mathematics

Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hadley Wickham rather than just read about it. In short: Hadley Alexander Wickham (born 14 October 1979) is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University.

Key takeaways

Hadley Wickham belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hadley Wickham to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hadley Wickham from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Hadley Alexander Wickham (born 14 October 1979) is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.

Early life and education Wickham was born in Hamilton, New Zealand. He received a bachelor's degree in human biology and a master's degree in statistics at the University of Auckland in 1999–2004 and his PhD at Iowa State University in 2008, supervised by Di Cook and Heike Hofmann. His sister, Charlotte Wickham, is also a statistician, data scientist and educator. She taught in the Statistics Department at Oregon State University between 2011 and 2022, and currently works for Posit PBC on the developer relations team. She holds a first-class honours bachelor of science degree in Statistics from University of Auckland and a PhD in statistics from University of California, Berkeley.

Career Wickham is the chief scientist at Posit PBC (formerly RStudio PBC) and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. He is a prominent and active member of the R user community, and has developed several notable and widely used packages including ggplot2, plyr, dplyr and reshape2. Wickham's data analysis packages for R are collectively known as the tidyverse. According to Wickham's tidy data approach, each variable should be a column, each observation should be a row, and each type of observational unit should be a table.

Honors and awards In 2006 he was awarded the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work developing tools for data reshaping and visualisation. Wickham was named a Fellow by the American Statistical Association in 2015 for "pivotal contributions to statistical practice through innovative and pioneering research in statistical graphics and computing". Wickham was awarded the international COPSS Presidents' Award in 2019 for "influential work in statistical computing, visualisation, graphics, and data analysis" including "making statistical thinking and computing accessible to a large audience".

Publications Wickham's publications include:

Wickham, Hadley; Grolemund, Garrett (2017). R for Data Science : Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1491910399. OCLC 968213225. Wickham, Hadley (2015). R Packages. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1491910597. Wickham, Hadley (2014). Advanced R. New York: Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series. ISBN 978-1466586963. Wickham, Hadley (2011). "The split-apply-combine strategy for data analysis". Journal of Statistical Software. 40 (1): 1–29. doi:10.18637/jss.v040.i01. Wickham, Hadley (2010). "A layered grammar of graphics". Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 19 (1): 3–28. doi:10.1198/jcgs.2009.07098. S2CID 58971746. Wickham, Hadley (2010). "stringr: modern, consistent string processing". The R Journal. 2 (2): 3–28. doi:10.32614/RJ-2010-012. Wickham, Hadley (2009). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!). New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0387981406. Wickham, Hadley (2007). "Reshaping data with the reshape package". Journal of Statistical Software. 21 (12): 1–20. doi:10.18637/jss.v021.i12.

References

External links On the web Hadley Wickham on Bluesky Hadley Wickham on X GitHub Interviews Interview Archived 2023-02-01 at the Wayback Machine by Datascience.LA at UseR! 2014 Interview by Yixuan Qiu (2013) Interview by Models are Talks and presentations Speaker Hadley Wickham Strata 2014 - O'Reilly Conferences, February 11 - 13, 2014, Santa Clara, CA Archived 2014-02-23 at the Wayback Machine Interview at Strata 2014 Illuminating and Wrong Ihaka Lecture Series 2017: Expressing yourself with R

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hadley Wickham

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hadley Wickham claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hadley Wickham before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hadley Wickham ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hadley Wickham

In research: Hadley Wickham appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hadley Wickham in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hadley Wickham is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1979 births, 21st-century statisticians, Data scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hadley Wickham outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hadley Wickham in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hadley Wickham means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hadley Wickham out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hadley Wickham in simple terms?

Why does Hadley Wickham matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hadley Wickham?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hadley Wickham.