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.[1] 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.[2]
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,[3] he now serves as the Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Iowa, a position he has held since 2002.
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.[4]
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.