Hadley Wickham
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Early life and education
Wickham was born in Hamilton, New Zealand. He received a bachelor's degree in human biology and a master's degree in statistics at the University of Auckland in 1999–2004 and his PhD at Iowa State University in 2008, supervised by Di Cook and Heike Hofmann.His sister, Charlotte Wickham, is also a statistician, data scientist and educator. She taught in the Statistics Department at Oregon State University between 2011 and 2022, and currently works for Posit PBC on the developer relations team. She holds a first-class honours bachelor of science degree in Statistics from University of Auckland and a PhD in statistics from University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Wickham is the chief scientist at Posit PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University.He is a prominent and active member of the R user community, and has developed several notable and widely used packages including ggplot2, plyr, dplyr and reshape2. Wickham's data analysis packages for R are collectively known as the tidyverse. According to Wickham's tidy data approach, each variable should be a column, each observation should be a row, and each type of observational unit should be a table.