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
Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks and
Modern Applied Statistics with S. Ripley helped develop the
S-PLUS programming language and its
open source derivative
R. He co-authored two books based on S,
S Programming and
Modern Applied Statistics with S. and from 2000 to 2021 he was one of the most active committers to the R core. The
package MASS is one of only fifteen "recommended packages" for R (with June 2024 more than 20,900). He was educated at the
University of Cambridge, where he was awarded both the
Smith's Prize (at the time awarded to the best graduate essay writer who had been undergraduate at Cambridge in that cohort) 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. ==Authored books==