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We are very proud to announce that Kurt Hornik with the R Core Team, has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics.

The Rousseeuw Prize is considered the 'Nobel Prize for Statistics.' The prestigious award, which comes with a one million dollar prize, goes to the developers of the R project, an open-source software that has been developed by an international team since the 1990s.

Award goes to Prof. Kurt Hornik

Among those honored for their long-standing work on 'R' are, besides four international colleagues, also Kurt Hornik from the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) at the Institute for Statistics and Mathematics. The award recognizes not only individual excellence but also WU Vienna's contribution to the global data science landscape.

Half of the prize money goes to the five award winners, as they are seen as the ones who have made the longest continuous contributions, and the other half goes to the other members of the R Core Team. The winners have invested nearly thirty years of work into R, developing an open-source programming language and software environment that turned statistics from an expensive proprietary corporate tool into a global public good.

Hornik was already involved in the development of "R" in the early 1990s. The goal was to develop a programming language "that is freely accessible worldwide and works on all operating systems," says Hornik. Today, "R" is considered the global standard language for data analysis and visualization and is used in research, business and public institutions. The central computing infrastructure for this is located on the campus of WU Vienna.

The award is given every two years by the King Baudouin Foundation in Leuven (Belgium) and funded by the renowned Belgian statistician Peter Rousseeuw, emeritus professor at KU Leuven. This year’s award goes to the five members of the R Core Team, who the jury says have made the longest and most lasting contribution: Brian Ripley (University of Oxford), Martin Mächler (ETH Zurich), Kurt Hornik (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Peter Dalgaard (Copenhagen Business School), and Luke Tierney (University of Iowa). The ceremony will take place on November 4th.

More information: The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics.