Congratulations to Professor Peter Dalgaard on receiving The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics
Peter has received what many call the "Nobel Prize in Statistics" – a well-deserved international recognition of his decades-long contributions to the R programming language and the global statistical community.
Peter Dalgaard is among five main recipients of the 2026 The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, a USD 1 million award recognising the development of R – the free, open-source programming language that has become a cornerstone of modern statistics and data analysis.
R is used worldwide in research, pharmaceutical development, finance and public institutions. Yet much of the software has been developed and maintained by a relatively small international group of researchers and volunteers.
Peter Dalgaard, professor at Center for Statistics at the Department of Finance at CBS has been a member of the R Core Team since 1997.
His work has focused particularly on release management: coordinating and quality-assuring new versions of R to ensure that updates do not introduce errors or disrupt existing analyses.
Congratulations to Peter and the entire R Core Team!
Read more about the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics and Peter's work with the R Core Team in the official announcement.
“I am deeply honoured to be a laureate of the 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, which has been awarded to the R Project. I have been working on R for almost 30 years with an extraordinary group of colleagues, clearly the core of my career. We built and maintained R with a vision to make statistical tools freely available and extendable. Seeing the work recognized at this level is truly heart-warming. Congratulations to my fellow awardees.” Peter Dalgaard
Professor
