Luke Tierney

{{short description|American computer scientist}}

{{BLP primary sources|date=May 2021}}

Luke Tierney is an American statistician and computer scientist. A fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1988 and of the American Statistical Association since 1991, Tierney is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Iowa.{{Cite web|date=March 8, 2021|title=Luke Tierney|url=https://stat.uiowa.edu/people/luke-tierney|website=University of Iowa}} Through his past work on programming languages such as R and Lisp, Tierney now holds a position on the developing team known as the R Core.{{Cite web|title=Contributors|url=https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html|website=R Project}}

Education

Tierney earned his BA and MA in mathematical sciences from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and later his PhD in operations research from Cornell University in 1980. Formerly a statistics faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Minnesota,{{Cite web|date=February 1, 2019|title=People News February 2019|url=https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2019/02/01/people-news-february-2019/|website=Amstat News}} he now serves as the Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Iowa, a position he has held since 2002.

Work

In 1990, Tierney wrote the XLispStat package using C and Lisp and has since published works such as LISP-STAT: An Object-Oriented Environment for Statistical Computing and Dynamic Graphics (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics) describing its design and use.{{Cite web|last=Tierney|first=Luke|title=Lisp-Stat Information|url=https://homepage.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/|website=University of Iowa}}

Tierney has also made contributions in areas such as reference counting, vectors, and compilation for the R programming language and environment. During his time working with R, he has also become part of the R Core, a team of developers with write access to the R source. His work on Markov chains, Bioconductor, Lisp-stat and the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm have all been highly cited.

Positions, awards and recognition

  • Current member of the R Core Team
  • Former editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics from 2004 to 2006
  • American Statistical Association
  • Fellow since 1991
  • Recipient of the 2019 Statistical Computing and Graphics Award
  • Institute of Mathematical Statistics
  • Fellow since 1988
  • Former elected council member from 1995 to 1998{{Cite web|date=2021|title=Past Elected Council Members|url=https://imstat.org/past-elected-council-members/|website=Institute of Mathematical Statistics}}
  • University of Iowa
  • Ralph E. Wareham Professor since 2002
  • Former chair of the statistics department from 2004 to 2014

References