The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to The R Project, recognising its transformative impact on statistical research, data analysis and scientific discovery worldwide. The biennial prize celebrates pioneering statistical innovations with broad societal impact and carries an award of US$1 million.
The 2026 laureates are five long-standing members of the R Core Team: 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 be shared among these five researchers in recognition of their sustained leadership over nearly three decades, while the remaining half will be distributed among the other members of the R Core Team, acknowledging R as a truly collaborative achievement.
Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, R has grown from an academic project into the world's leading open-source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Today, it is used by millions of researchers, analysts, educators and practitioners across disciplines, providing an accessible platform for developing, sharing and applying statistical methods. Its extensive package ecosystem has accelerated innovation and reproducible research in statistics, data science and machine learning.
Awarded by the King Baudouin Foundation and established by statistician Peter J. Rousseeuw, the Rousseeuw Prize recognises statistical innovations that have made a profound and lasting contribution to science and society. Previous awards honoured groundbreaking work in causal inference (2022) and false discovery rate methodology (2024), making the recognition of the R Project a fitting tribute to one of the most influential statistical innovations of the modern era.
