Brian David Ripley

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

(born 29 April 1952) is a British

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

. From 1990, he was professor of

applied statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

and is also a professorial fellow at St Peter's College. He retired August 2014 due to ill health.

Biography

Ripley has made contributions to the fields of

spatial statistics Spatial analysis or spatial statistics includes any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques, many still in their early deve ...

and pattern recognition. His work on

artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

s in the 1990s helped to bring aspects of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and data mining to the attention of statistical audiences. He emphasised the value of

robust statistics Robust statistics are statistics with good performance for data drawn from a wide range of probability distributions, especially for distributions that are not normal. Robust statistical methods have been developed for many common problems, suc ...

in his books ''Modern Applied Statistics with S'' and ''Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks''. Ripley helped develop the

S programming language S is a statistical programming language developed primarily by John Chambers and (in earlier versions) Rick Becker and Allan Wilks of Bell Laboratories. The aim of the language, as expressed by John Chambers, is "to turn ideas into software, quic ...

and its implementations: S-PLUS and R. He co-authored two books based on S, ''Modern Applied Statistics with S'' and ''S Programming''. From 2000 to 2021 he was one of the most active committers to the R core. He was educated at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, where he was awarded both the

Smith's Prize The Smith's Prize was the name of each of two prizes awarded annually to two research students in mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1769. Following the reorganization in 1998, they are now awarded under the n ...

(at the time awarded to the best graduate essay writer who had been undergraduate at Cambridge in that cohort) and the

Rollo Davidson Prize The Rollo Davidson Prize is a prize awarded annually to early-career probabilists by the Rollo Davidson trustees. It is named after English mathematician Rollo Davidson (1944–1970). Rollo Davidson Trust In 1970, Rollo Davidson, a Fellow-elec ...

. The university also awarded him the Adams Prize in 1987 for an essay entitled ''Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes'', later published as a book. He served on the faculty of Imperial College, London from 1976 until 1983, at which point he moved to the

University of Strathclyde The University of Strathclyde ( gd, Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh) is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal chart ...

.Profile of Professor Brian D Ripley
(Last edited 1 October 1999 by Brian Ripley). Accessed 2010-12-28.

Authored books

* Ripley, B. D. (1981) ''Spatial Statistics''. Wiley, 252pp. . * Ripley, B. D. (1983) ''Stochastic Simulation''. Wiley, . * * Ripley, B. D. (1996) ''Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks''. Cambridge University Press. 403 pages. . * Venables, W. N. and Ripley, B. D. (2000) ''S Programming''. Springer, 264pp. . * Venables, W. N. and Ripley, B. D. (2002) ''Modern Applied Statistics with S'' (Fourth Edition; previous editions published as ''Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS'' in 1994, 1997 & 1999). Springer, 462pp. .

References

External links

Brian Ripley's home page
at the University of Oxford {{DEFAULTSORT:Ripley, Brian D 1952 births British statisticians Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Living people Fellows of St Peter's College, Oxford R (programming language) people Spatial statisticians Computational statisticians