The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics 2026 has been awarded to the R Core Team in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the development of the R Project.

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The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics 2026 has been awarded to five distinguished members of the R Core Team in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the development of the R Project. The laureates include Professors Brian Ripley (University of Oxford, UK), Martin Maechler (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Kurt Hornik (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria), Peter Dalgaard (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark), and Luke Tierney (University of Iowa, USA).

Half of the prize money will go directly to these laureates, who have contributed significantly over nearly three decades, while the other half will support the broader R Core Team. Their work has democratized access to statistical programming through the open-source R language, transforming it from an expensive proprietary tool into a widely accessible resource for researchers, educators, governments, and students around the globe.

Since its inception in the early 90s by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, which also announced news of the award, R has become an essential environment for data analysis and graphics, supported by a vast ecosystem of over 23,000 packages available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). The R Core Team has continuously enhanced R’s capabilities, ensuring multilingual support and ongoing adaptation to technological advances, which has resulted in a vibrant community of users who collaborate and share their work.

The R Project has gained over 343,000 citations on Semantic Scholar and has fundamentally transformed statistical analysis worldwide by making advanced analytics accessible to all.

Read more about the prize here.

Download the full press release (pdf) here.

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