Friedrich Leisch

Born in Vienna, Austria, Friedrich Leisch completed his education in Technical Mathematics at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien). He received his doctorate in 1999 with a thesis titled Ensemble Methods for Neural Clustering and Classification, supervised by Kurt Hornik, and achieved his habilitation in statistics in 2005. == Career ==

Leisch's academic career began at TU Wien, moving to LMU Munich in 2006 as a professor of statistics. He returned to Vienna in 2011 to serve as a full professor at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), where he led the Institute of Applied Statistics and Computing. == Contributions ==

Leisch was instrumental in the early stages of the R project, joining the R Core Development Team and later serving as the first Secretary General of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. He developed the Sweave system, integrating R with LaTeX to promote reproducible research. He co-organized several seminal conferences in Vienna, namely the first three "Distributed Statistical Computing (DSC)" conferences (1999, 2001, 2003) as well as the first useR! conference in 2004. == Death ==

Leisch died on 24 April 2024, at the age of 55, following a serious illness. His death was mourned across the statistical community and at BOKU University, which published a tribute expressing their loss. == References ==