(Radio Iowa) – A University of Iowa professor of mathematical sciences who’s retiring today (Wednesday) is being awarded what’s considered the Nobel Prize for his field, after spending decades helping to build one of the most influential tools in modern statistics. Luke Tierney (TEER-nee) started work in the 1990s on the statistical computing platform — known only by the letter R — which is now available for free and is being used by millions worldwide.
“It’s a software system for doing data analysis and data visualization,” Tierney says. “So it’s a behind-the-scenes thing that gets used by a lot of scientists in a number of different fields. A lot of journalists use it to work through data and create visualizations of the data in particular.” Tierney is being named as one of five laureates of the one-million-dollar Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics. It’s awarded once every two years by a foundation in Belgium which recognizes major contributions to statistical research.
“I am not getting a million bucks, no,” Tierney says. “The way they decide to work it is, half of the prize is split among the five who they picked as the people to name individually. So each of us gets $100,000. The other half is going to go to the remainder of the group in some way that still needs to be determined.” Tierney will share the prize with four other key researchers in Austria, Denmark, the U-K, and Switzerland, and he says there are 19 people on the full team.
The foundation cited the R Core Team’s extraordinary, unpaid work that has transformed statistics “into a global public good” while influencing statistical methodology, data science, and scientific research. Tierney is retiring from the U-I today and will move to emeritus status, but says he plans to continue working on R. As for the prize money, he’s formulating a plan.
“We have a fund that we solicit donations to support the project,” Tierney says. “We pay some people to sometimes buy out of teaching or something like that, and again, I haven’t thought this through in any detail yet, but basically I think I’ll put my money into that fund.”
An awards ceremony will be held in Belgium in November.
