About the Award

The Founders of Statistics Prize for Contemporary Research Contributions is given in honour of the Founders of Statistics. It recognizes a research contribution that has had profound influence on statistical theory, methodology, practice, or applications.

The contribution must be a research article or book published within the last three decades. The prize is given biennially, at the ISI World Statistics Congress (WSC). It comprises a cash award of 5,000 euros, and the winner presents the Founders of Statistics Prize Lecture at the WSC. If the contribution has multiple authors, the cash prize will be divided equally. The WSC 2021 will be a virtual congress and no travel support will therefore be provided. Complimentary registration fee is part of the prize.

The ISI is grateful to Elsevier for sponsoring the prize.

Submitting nominations

See the Call for Nominations for the 2021 prize. The deadline for nominations is 7 January 2021.

Former Karl Pearson Prize

The Founders of Statistics Prize was formerly named ‘Karl Pearson Prize’ after one of the Founders of statistical science, whose many contributions include the chi-square test for goodness of fit, the principal component method of dimension reduction, and the method of moments for statistical estimation. On the other hand, Pearson was an active eugenics proponent. While Pearson’s eugenic ideas are not surprising for his time, we reject them today, as we reject all discriminatory ideas. In coherence with ISI principles, we find it inappropriate to keep using Karl Pearson’s name in association with prizes, lectures and other awards. Therefore it was decided to rename the Prize and honour the many Founders of Statistics with this Prize.