WU Professor Kurt Hornik Wins $1 Million Statistics Prize

Often called the “Nobel Prize in Statistics,” this $1 million award recognizes Hornik’s leading role in the creation of the open‑source programming language R – which is one of the world’s most important tools for data analysis and has become indispensable in science and business.

From WU Vienna to the World

Hornik began developing R with a group of colleagues in the early 1990s. “Our goal was to develop a programming language that is freely accessible worldwide and works on all operating systems,” says Kurt Hornik. “In this way, we wanted to ensure that as many brilliant minds as possible would be able to contribute to its further development – true to the spirit of science and for the benefit of society,” he points out. Today, R is regarded as the global standard for data analysis and visualization, and it is widely used in research, industry, and by public institutions. “The software is the result of decades of international collaboration,” Hornik says. What many people don’t know: The backbone of R – the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) – is hosted on the WU Vienna campus. It is the central repository and infrastructure that users worldwide rely on to find and install R packages. This means that WU has been making a significant contribution to the global research infrastructure for decades now. This also shows how Austrian universities can help drive international research forward when they have the right conditions for nourishing scientific excellence over the long term.

R’s role in shaping science, business, and policy

R is used in countless fields, from medicine and pharmaceutical research to finance, climate science, and the public sector. Examples include the analysis of clinical trial data for regulatory approvals, macroeconomic modeling at central banks, and genomic analyses of DNA and cancer data. During the COVID-19 pandemic, R also played a central role – for instance in powering widely cited dashboards and epidemiological models that informed policy decisions. “Reliable conclusions regarding topics such as health, the economy, or the climate are always based on statistical methods,” says Hornik. “The fact that these methods are now freely accessible worldwide is a decisive step forward.” R has fundamentally changed how the world works with data.

The “Nobel Prize in Statistics”

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics is awarded every two years and is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Statistics.” Worth $1 million, it is awarded by the Leuven-based King Baudouin Foundation to honor groundbreaking statistical innovations that see broad application and deliver lasting benefits to society. The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize recognizes the role the programming language R has played as a groundbreaking tool for data analysis. Professor Kurt Hornik from the WU Institute for Statistics and Mathematics and his international colleagues receive this distinction for decades of invaluable work. The award will be presented in Leuven on November 4, 2026.