We are pleased to announce that the Statistical Computing and Graphics Award committee has chosen Luke Tierney of the University of Iowa as the recipient of the 2019 Statistical Computing and Graphics Award, in recognition of his enormously influential creation of XLisp-Stat, substantial work on MCMC methods, and critical contributions to R.
Luke Tierney, Fellow of the ASA and Fellow of the IMS, is the Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Iowa. He received his PhD in Operations Research from Cornell in 1980. After being on the faculty of Statistics at Carnegie-Mellon University and then at the University of Minnesota, he joined the University of Iowa in 2002, where he chaired the Department from 2004 to 2014. He served as editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics from 2004 to 2006.
Luke single-handedly built XLisp-Stat, an interactive statistical computing environment on top of the XLisp language, with many advanced features that influenced later statistical software. The newer generation of statisticians and data scientists have benefited from his fundamental contributions to R in areas such as memory management, namespacing, byte-code compiling, parallel computing, and, more recently, alternative representation for R objects. Many of these contributions are critically important yet least known to the general users. His quiet contributions have enabled a generation of data analysts to do their work through the global open source data analysis system R, which bridges statistics and data science.
The Awards Committee consists of the past and present Chair of the Section on Statistical Computing (Catherine Calder and Juergen Symanzik) and the Section on Statistical Graphics (Michael Friendly and Jay Emerson). Many thanks for their time and work!
Jun Yan, Awards Chair
Sections on Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics