In robustness, as in every area he touched, John Tukey produced hundreds of original ideas, some brilliant, fundamental and lasting, some ephemeral. He presented them in a rambling fashion, in survey articles, in technical reports, in mimeographed draft memoranda and some only in lectures. Along the route, like The Three Princes of Serendip (a favorite fable of his), he would make unexpected discoveries by accident and sagacity. When I started working in robustness in 1961, I much profited from the superb reprint and preprint collection then housed in the coffee room of the Berkeley Statistics Department, containing a fair number of his unpublished papers. Tukey loved words, especially those he had created himself, and his baffling terminology made those papers hard to understand, especially to an outsider like me. The precise meaning of his words sometimes changed over time, and important ideas occasionally got lost in the passage from a preliminary to the final version of a paper.In Tukey's oeuvre, his contributions to robustness are among the least organized, and, regrettably, there is still no corresponding Collected Works volume. I shall try to identify some of Tukey's more important or fertile contributions and to separate them into four categories: conceptual; tools; techniques; and procedures. The separation between the latter three categories admittedly is somewhat fuzzy, but it clarifies matters if we do not throw things such as diagnostic tools, Monte Carlo techniques and estimation procedures all into the same pot. At the same time I shall try to transmit some impression of John's idiosyncrasies and style of interaction. The choice and assessment of the importance of his contributions are mine and sometimes would differ from his own.
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