KIWA Staff Photo
Statewide, Iowa – A University of Iowa professor of mathematical sciences who retired this past Wednesday is being awarded what’s considered the Nobel Prize for his field, after spending decades helping to build one of the most influential tools in modern statistics.
Luke Tierney started work in the 1990s on the statistical computing platform — known only by the letter R — which is now available for free and is being used by millions worldwide.
Tierney is being named as one of five laureates of the $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics. It’s awarded once every two years by a foundation in Belgium which recognizes major contributions to statistical research.
Tierney will share the prize with four other key researchers in Austria, Denmark, the UK, and Switzerland, and he says there are 19 people on the full team. The foundation cited the R Core Team’s extraordinary, unpaid work that has transformed statistics “into a global public good” while influencing statistical methodology, data science, and scientific research.
Tierney has retired from the U of I and will move to emeritus status, but says he plans to continue working on R. As for the prize money, he’s formulating a plan.
An awards ceremony will be held in Belgium in November.
