An Oxford professor who developed free software which can analyse and visualise huge amounts of data has been recognised for his efforts by a global prize.
Prof Brian Ripley has spent the past three decades working on R – a programming language model that has become the foundation of modern statistical computing.
The software is used across the globe by institutions including the Bank of England and the BBC to make huge amounts of data easier to understand and is open-source – meaning it is completely free to access.
Ripley, who is based at the University of Oxford, said the software had "impacts on a lot of people's everyday lives", before adding: "They just don't know it yet."
"Statistics these days is mainly about finding patterns in data and also ways to present them in ways that the audience can understand.
"So we wanted to provide a platform that people could do this, and do new things in as well as old things," he added.
R first originated at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, where professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman started it as a programming language to teach introductory statistics.
In the mid-1990s, Prof Ripley began lending his hand as a volunteer to help develop the software further.
"Some of us had a vision that maybe computers could change statistics," the 74-year-old explained.
During its development, the team behind R ensured the programming language could be edited and built upon by users, as and when they needed.
The tool is used by companies and institutions including Amazon, Google and the Bank of England, and can quickly turn enormous tables full of data into graphs – making that information more accessible.
The BBC uses it to present information to audiences on statistically-complex issues including election results, hospital waiting lists or house prices.
Ripley and his four fellow R developers have now been awarded the 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Building the Language Behind Modern Statistics.
He said it had felt "pretty good" to be recognised for his efforts.
"This sort of thing has not generally been widely recognised in academic statistics", he said.
As part of the prize, the R team – who have thus-far been unpaid for its work on the software – will get to split $1m (£755,000) between them.
"I'm fortunate enough that I'm old, retired and been rather successful so even if I had a million dollars, it wouldn't make a difference to me," Ripley said of the prize money.
"Some, maybe all, of my share will be spent on things helping to develop R," he added.
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