UI statistician shares prestigious $1M Rousseeuw Prize for helping transform statistical computing

When Luke Tierney first became involved with a new academic computing project in the mid-1990s, his expectations were modest.

"If we had a couple hundred users, that would be nice," the University of Iowa statistics professor recalls.

Three decades later, the free, open-source R Project has become one of the most influential tools in modern statistics, used by millions of people globally, including pharmaceutical researchers, financial analysts, government agencies, and college students. And Tierney, Iowa's Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences, was recently named one of five laureates of the $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics.

"The prize wasn't really something I had on my radar," says Tierney, who retired July 1 and moved to emeritus status. "We just wanted to build something that would be easily accessible to anyone."

Sometimes described as the field's Nobel Prize, the Rousseeuw Prize, awarded by Belgium's King Baudouin Foundation, recognizes major contributions to statistical research. It is given once every two years, with 2026 marking just the third time.

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. The platform has been cited more than 340,000 times in scientific literature, according to the foundation.

The other laureates are Brian Ripley (University of Oxford), Martin Maechler (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Kurt Hornik (Vienna University of Economics and Business), and Peter Dalgaard (Copenhagen Business School). All are members of the R Core Team, which has helped oversee the project's development.

"There are 19 members of the R Core Team at the moment," Tierney says. "Nothing could have happened without all those folks."

When he began working on R in the mid-1990s, Tierney already was a pioneer in computational statistics and data visualization with a Guggenheim fellowship under his belt. He built critical aspects of the platform that have fueled its massive growth.

R users can develop their own packages of statistical tools and share them with others through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), creating a constantly expanding collection of tools.

"When we started, maybe there were a couple hundred packages," Tierney says. "Now there are about 24,000. The fact that we've been able to grow and sustain something like that is probably one of the most amazing things."

Although Tierney became involved with R before arriving at Iowa in 2002, he says the university has played an important role in supporting his work. Iowa provided the infrastructure that allowed him to continue contributing to R while teaching, conducting research, and serving as department chair.

"The computing resources and support people at Iowa have been very good," he says, adding that only in a university setting could a project like this have flourished. "The vast majority of people in R Core have been at universities, so they're doing this as part of their scholarship rather than looking at a quarterly bottom line."

While Tierney has begun looking at ways to pass his work on to others in retirement, he has no plans to step away. "My plan is to continue working on R," he says. "There are bigger things that need to be done, and I hope to be involved in them."

In November, Tierney will travel to Leuven, Belgium, for the awards ceremony.