A University of Iowa professor is among five statisticians awarded the 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, an international honor recognizing major contributions to statistical research.
Luke Tierney, a professor at the University of Iowa, and four colleagues were recognized for their decades of work building and maintaining R, a free and open-source statistical computing language used across research institutions, healthcare systems, financial organizations and technology companies worldwide.
The prize carries a $1 million award. The five laureates share half the prize money, recognized as having made the longest sustained contributions to the project. The other half is shared among others who have been active on the R Core Team.
Together, R Project volunteers have spent 27 years and a collective 28,000 coding hours developing the software, which is relied upon by organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, major pharmaceutical companies, and central banks including the European Central Bank and the Bank of England.
“Long before AI became a global conversation, the R Core Team was building the statistical infrastructure that made today’s data-driven world possible,” said David Donoho, a statistics professor at Stanford University. “This team’s stewardship of R created an open and trusted foundation for research across disciplines and continents. Few innovations have had such a profound effect on how knowledge is produced, shared, and validated in the modern era.”
By keeping R free and open-source under the GNU General Public License, the R Core Team removed financial barriers that have historically limited access to advanced analytics software, making the same statistical tools available to researchers, students, hospitals, public health organizations and governments regardless of institutional resources.
The other 2026 honorees are Brian D. Ripley, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford; Martin Maechler, emeritus professor at ETH Zurich; Kurt Hornik, department chair at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business; and Peter Dalgaard, professor at Copenhagen Business School.
The prize is named after Peter Rousseeuw, a Belgian statistician known for his work in robust statistics and data analysis.
