Statistics is a key to understanding reality. It helps students and researchers, as well as businesses and public authorities, to assess how reliable their results are and how well they capture and explain a given phenomenon. Those who carry out statistical data analysis today will most often turn to the programming language R \u2014 one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, and freely available as open-source software.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, R has established itself as a common language for statistics and data analysis. It is also one of the pioneering projects in free and open-source software development. Today, researchers worldwide have access to the core software as well as some 23,000 extension packages available online \u2014 with the result that there is barely a field of research in which R is not used.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In biology and medicine, for example, R forms the foundation of Bioconductor, the software used by laboratories worldwide for DNA and cancer research. During the Covid pandemic, R served as a tool in many countries to track the spread of the virus. Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, use R to calculate whether a new drug is effective and safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Three Decades of Dedication Recognised\u00a0 <\/p>\n
At the heart of the R project, a core team has been working for some 30 years, responsible for the continued development and quality assurance of the base software. Martin M\u00e4chler, emeritus professor at the Seminar for Statistics at ETH Zurich, has been part of the team from the outset. Today, five members of the R core team have been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in recognition of their decades-long commitment and their foundational contributions to the success of the statistical programming language R.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like the Nobel Prize, the Belgian Rousseeuw Prize carries a cash award of one million US dollars. It is presented every two years by the King Baudouin Foundation and funded by the statistician Peter Rousseeuw himself \u2014 an emeritus professor at KU Leuven, who began his academic career at ETH Zurich and later spent some time in the financial industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From Teaching Tool to Research Revolution\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Half of the prize money \u2014 500,000 US dollars \u2014 goes to the five open-source pioneers who have led the development of R. They are Martin M\u00e4chler, emeritus professor at ETH Zurich; Brian Ripley, professor at the University of Oxford; Kurt Hornik, professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business; Peter Dalgaard, professor at Copenhagen Business School; and Luke Tierney, professor at the University of Iowa.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The remaining half of the prize money goes to the other members of the R core team, among them the two creators of R, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, who are explicitly honoured for the decisive impetus they provided. They developed R in the early 1990s for teaching and research at the University of Auckland.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They named their statistical language R partly as a nod to their own first names, and partly as a tribute to the older programming language S, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, on which R is built. S itself has served as a foundation for modern software such as Python, the programming language at the heart of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Accordingly, John Chambers, the creator of S, is also among the laureates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Martin M\u00e4chler joined the R core team in the early 1990s. From 1991 he was a research associate at the Seminar for Statistics, becoming a professor there in 2020. In that role he was responsible for applied computational statistics and worked on the interface between data analysis and programming. He studied and completed his doctorate at ETH Zurich in statistics, at some interface of numerical analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This branch of mathematics is concerned with solving problems as accurately and reliably as possible using computers \u2014 for instance by designing computational methods that are stable and minimise numerical errors. “At ETH Zurich I found my dream job,” says M\u00e4chler. “And early on, the statistics seminar had the vision that statistical computing and programming would be crucial to modern data science and statistical research.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Statistics is a key to understanding reality. It helps students and researchers, as well as businesses and public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6],"tags":[225,8614,3383,12474,43841,272,22481,51],"class_list":["post-86130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-zurich","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-computer-and-information-technology","tag-cooperations","tag-d-math","tag-honours-and-prizes","tag-international","tag-mathematics","tag-zurich"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116766226672218058","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}