Congratulations to our very own Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chairperson, for winning the “Nobel Prize of Statistics.” The award is given to a person under the age of 41, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. According to Wikipedia, the COPSS Presidents’ Award, along with the International Prize in Statistics, are considered the two highest awards in Statistics.

The award citation recognized Wickham’s “influential work in statistical computing, visualization, graphics, and data analysis” including “making statistical thinking and computing accessible to a large audience.”

In previous years, the award has primarily recognized theoretical contributions to statistics. This year is the first time it has been awarded for practical application.

Hadley is Chief Scientist at RStudio, a Platinum member of the R Foundation, and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and the University of Auckland. The skills with statistics runs in the family: his sister is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Oregon State University.

Hadley builds tools – both computational and cognitive – to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science – a pioneering a suite of tools for R known as the “Tidyverse”: including ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, purrr, and readr – and principled software development (roxygen2, testthat, devtools). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science. Learn more on his website, http://hadley.nz.

Congratulations, Hadley!

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