Great news that a major Statistics prize like the Rousseeuw Prize goes to the R Core Team, esp. Brian Ripley (University of Oxford), Martin Mächler (ETH Zürich), Kurt Hornik (WU Wien), Peter Dalgaard (Copenhagen Business School), and Luke Tierney (University of Iowa). R is indeed a unique phenomenon, where open-source and open-access has been developed by and for the statistics community. Which is about to release R version 4.6.1 (Happy Hop) version.

Thanks to the R Core Team (and congrats!). Half of the Prize goes to the other members of the Team.

“The international and independent jury, appointed by the King Baudouin Foundation, has recognised the groundbreaking work of five members of the R Core Team who have been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics. The international award, which recognises major contributions to statistical research, honours their nearly three decades of unpaid work building R, the open-source language that has become the common foundation of modern statistical computing.

Statistics is everywhere. It determines whether a new medicine is safe enough to reach patients, monitors risk in financial markets, and tracks how diseases spread. R is the tool that made it accessible to everyone. The language that the R Core Team built is trusted by institutions including the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and major pharmaceutical companies worldwide.”