Hadley Alexander Wickham (born 14 October 1979) is a

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

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

and Chief Scientist at Posit, PBC (former RStudio Inc.) and an adjunct

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

of statistics at the

University of Auckland , mottoeng = By natural ability and hard work , established = 1883; years ago , endowment = NZD $293 million (31 December 2021) , budget = NZD $1.281 billion (31 December 2021) , chancellor = Cecilia Tarrant , vice_chancellor = Dawn F ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, and

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

. He is best known for his development of

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

for the R statistical programming language for

data visualisation Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is num ...

, including

ggplot2 ggplot2 is an open-source data visualization R package, package for the Computational statistics, statistical programming language R (programming language), R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson' ...

, and other

tidyverse The tidyverse is a collection of open source packages for the R programming language introduced by Hadley Wickham and his team that "share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures" of tidy data. Characteristic features of tidy ...

packages, which support a

tidy data Tidy data is an alternative name for the common statistical form called a ''model matrix'' or ''data matrix''. A data matrix is defined in as follows: A standard method of displaying a multivariate set of data is in the form of a data matrix in ...

approach to

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

Education and career

Wickham was born in

Hamilton, New Zealand Hamilton ( mi, Kirikiriroa) is an inland city in the North Island of New Zealand. Located on the banks of the Waikato River, it is the seat and most populous city of the Waikato region. With a territorial population of , it is the country's fou ...

. He received a Bachelors degree in

Human Biology Human biology is an interdisciplinary area of academic study that examines humans through the influences and interplay of many diverse fields such as genetics, evolution, physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, anthropology, human ecology, ecology, hum ...

and a masters degree in statistics at the

in 1999–2004 and his PhD at

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

in 2008 supervised by Di Cook and Heike Hofmann. Wickham is a prominent and active member of the R user community and has developed several notable and widely used packages including

, plyr, dplyr, and reshape2. Wickham's data analysis packages for R are collectively known as the

. According to Wickham's

approach, each

variable Variable may refer to: * Variable (computer science), a symbolic name associated with a value and whose associated value may be changed * Variable (mathematics), a symbol that represents a quantity in a mathematical expression, as used in many ...

should be a

column A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member. ...

, each observation should be a

row Row or ROW may refer to: Exercise *Rowing, or a form of aquatic movement using oars *Row (weight-lifting), a form of weight-lifting exercise Math *Row vector, a 1 × ''n'' matrix in linear algebra. *Row (database), a single, implicitly structured ...

, and each type of observational unit should be a

table Table may refer to: * Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs * Table (landform), a flat area of land * Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns * Table (database), how the table data ...

Honors and awards

In 2006 he was awarded the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work developing tools for data reshaping and visualisation. Wickham was named a Fellow by the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

in 2015 for "pivotal contributions to statistical practice through innovative and pioneering research in statistical graphics and computing". Wickham was awarded the international

COPSS Presidents' Award The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. The COPSS Presidents' Award is generally ...

in 2019 for "influential work in statistical computing, visualisation, graphics, and data analysis" including "making statistical thinking and computing accessible to a large audience".

Education and career

Honors and awards

Personal life

Publications

References

External links