Kurt Hornik and co-researchers win the Rousseeuw Prize

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, the one-million-dollar award regarded as the Nobel Prize of statistics, goes this year to The R Project. Behind that name sits a free software programme that has become indispensable across every field that works with data, and there are a great many of them. Pharmaceutical companies use it to calculate whether a new drug is effective and safe. During the coronavirus pandemic, researchers used it to track how fast the virus was spreading through. The prize honours nearly thirty years of work by an international team that has made statistics and data analysis free and accessible to everyone. R plays the same role in the world of data that Wikipedia plays for the encyclopaedia.

The prize is presented by the King Baudouin Foundation and funded by the eminent Belgian statistician Peter Rousseeuw, emeritus professor at KU Leuven (Belgium). It goes to the five members of the R Core Team who, in the jury's view, have made the longest and most sustained contribution: Professor Brian Ripley (University of Oxford), Professor Martin Maechler (ETH Zürich), Professor Kurt Hornik (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Professor Peter Dalgaard (Copenhagen Business School) and Professor Luke Tierney (University of Iowa).

About the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics is a biennial science award of one million dollars, often compared to the Nobel Prize. It is administered by the King Baudouin Foundation and funded by statistician Peter Rousseeuw to put outstanding statistics on the map worldwide. It is organised by KU Leuven statisticians Mia Hubert and Stefan Van Aelst. Previous editions honoured work on causal inference in medicine (2022, presented by King Philippe at KU Leuven) and the false discovery rate (2024).

More information: www.rousseeuwprize.org.