The Rousseeuw Prize honors five pioneering developers for nearly three decades of unpaid work building R, the foundational open-source computing language behind artificial intelligence, healthcare, and economic decision-making.

• The $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes three decades of foundational work that transformed how statistical methods are developed, validated, and shared globally.
• R, the open-source statistical computing language, underpins modern AI development, pharmaceutical research, financial modeling, and global scientific analysis.
• Used by organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, major pharmaceutical companies, and global central banks, R has become the trusted infrastructure for high-stakes analysis because it is stable, auditable, and reproducible.

NEW YORK – June 17, 2026 — Five members of the R Core Team have been awarded the prestigious Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics for their decades of work building and maintaining the R Project, “R,” a free and open-source statistical computing language used across global research institutions, healthcare systems, financial organizations, and technology companies. The Rousseeuw Prize is an international award recognizing major contributions to statistical research. 

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize 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
• Peter Dalgaard, professor at Copenhagen Business School
• Luke Tierney, professor at the University of Iowa

The five laureates receive half of the prize money because they are deemed to have made the longest sustained contributions to the R project; the other half of the prize is shared among the many others who have been active on the R Core Team.

Together, the R Project volunteers have spent the last 27 years and a collective 28,000 coding hours on R, developing an open-source programming language and software environment that transformed statistics from a proprietary corporate tool into a global public good. The software is relied upon by organizations including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies, and central banks such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of England.

The award recognizes the team’s role in making advanced statistical tools widely accessible. By keeping R free and open-source under the GNU General Public License, the R Core Team removed many of the financial barriers that have historically limited access to advanced analytics software. Due to this increased accessibility, hundreds of thousands of users including researchers, students, hospitals, public health organizations, and governments around the world are able to utilize the same statistical tools regardless of institutional resources. In addition, they use R to share transcripts of their data analyses, allowing one user’s workflows to power other users data analyses everywhere around the world. The frictionless spread of these transcripts has powered countless educational data science projects globally and hundreds of course textbooks at the PhD and Master’s level. In a recent twist, it’s not only humans who use R: AI data analyst `agents’ have been learning from the massive volume of published R transcripts and are now able to assist with many everyday data analysis tasks. 

“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 Stanford University statistics professor and leading statistician David Donoho, PhD. “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.”

Named after Professor Peter Rousseeuw, a pioneering Belgian statistician known for his foundational work in robust statistics and data analysis, the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes innovations that have transformed the understanding and application of data for the benefit of society. Past laureates include internationally renowned statisticians and researchers whose work has advanced fields ranging from epidemiology and artificial intelligence to public policy and scientific discovery.

For more information, visit https://www.rousseeuwprize.org/.

###

Media Contact:

[email protected]