Kurt Hornik shares million-dollar Rousseeuw Prize

Kurt Hornik, a professor at Vienna University of Economics and Business, will share the Rousseeuw Prize, an award regarded as the unofficial Nobel Prize of statistics, with fellow developers of the R programming language. The prize is worth one million dollars, ORF reports.

Hornik has been part of the team developing R since the early 1990s. The software is used mainly for statistical analysis in research, including cancer studies, testing new medicines and calculating economic risks. It is free to use.

Hornik told ORF’s “Wien heute” programme that modern statistical software was unaffordable for most people 30 years ago. Three decades of development had given people around the world free access to current tools for statistics and graphics, he said.

The project began after psychiatrists at Vienna General Hospital asked Hornik for help analysing data. He improved the software and wrote add-on packages. About 25,000 packages are now available worldwide, with their central archive hosted by the university.

The prize money will be shared with the other award recipients and the development team. Hornik plans to use his share to support future research. He said the university had given him the environment to pursue his goal of developing free software, but that leading research always needs more funding.

On Wednesday, November 11, Hornik will discuss R’s effect on science with international colleagues at the university. The event is open to the public, but registration is required. It will also be streamed online.