Brian D. Ripley

Who is Brian D. Ripley?

Brian David Ripley FRSE is a British statistician. Since 1990, he has been professor of applied statistics at the University of Oxford and is also a professorial fellow at St Peter's College.

Ripley has made contributions to the fields of spatial statistics and pattern recognition. His work on artificial neural networks in the 1990s helped to bring aspects of machine learning and data mining to the attention of statistical audiences. He emphasised the value of robust statistics in his books Modern Applied Statistics with S and Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks.

Ripley helped develop the S programming language and its implementations: S-PLUS and R. He co-authored two books based on S, Modern Applied Statistics with S and S Programming.

He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded both the Smith's Prize and the Rollo Davidson Prize. The university also awarded him the Adams Prize in 1987 for an essay entitled Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes, later published as a book. He served on the faculty of Imperial College, London from 1976 until 1983, at which point he moved to the University of Strathclyde.