Leland Wilkinson is a statistician and computer scientist at SYSTAT Software Inc. Dr. Wilkinson developed SYSTAT in the early 1980s, sold it to SPSS in 1995, and now serves as Executive VP of SYSTAT Software Inc.

in Chicago. His research focuses on scientific visualization and statistical graphics. He is the son of Mr.

and Mrs Kirk C. Wilkinson. He is brother of Alec Wilkinson, a writer for New Yorker.

He is married to Reverend Ruth VanDemark, and is the father of Amie Wilkinson, a professor at Northwestern University, and Caroline Wilkinson. Wilkinson received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1966, an S.T.B. from Harvard in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University in 1975. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a full-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He is presently Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago. Wilkinson wrote SYSTAT, a statistical software package, in the early 1980s. This program was noted for its comprehensive graphics, including the first software implementation of the heatmap display now widely used among biologists.

After his company grew to 50 employees, he sold it to SPSS in 1995. At SPSS, he assembled a team of graphics programmers who developed the nViZn platform that produces the visualizations in SPSS, Clementine, and other analytics products. The nViZn platform was modeled after Wilkinson's book on statistical graphics, The Grammar of Graphics.

This book also influenced the development of the R (programming language) ggplot2 package and the Polaris project at Stanford. Wilkinson now serves as Executive VP of SYSTAT Software Inc. in Chicago.

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