Ross Ihaka
George Ross Ihaka is a New Zealand statistician. He was an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland until his retirement in 2017.Career
Ihaka completed his undergraduate education at the University of Auckland, and obtained his PhD in 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis was titled Ruaumoko, after the Māori god of earthquakes, volcanoes and seasons. Along with Robert Gentleman, he is one of the originators of the R programming language. In 2008, he received the Pickering Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, for his work on R. As of 2010, he was working on a new statistical programming language based on Lisp. The Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland started a public lecture series in his honour in 2017.Personal life
Ihaka is of Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne and Ngati Pākehā descent.
