Friedrich Leisch
Also known as Fritz Leisch, Friderich Leisch
Friedrich Leisch was a statistician whose work spanned neural clustering and the R language. In 1997 he joined the R Core Development Team, and he co-founded CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, with Kurt Hornik. His 1999 doctorate concerned ensemble methods for neural clustering and classification. He became the first Secretary General of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, and from 2011 he led the Institute of Statistics at BOKU University in Vienna. He died in 2024 after a serious illness.
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Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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1987–1999
Degrees and a TU Wien post
He begins studies at TU Wien in 1987 and earns a master's degree in 1993. In 1994 he joins the Department of Statistics and Probability Theory there as an assistant professor. In 1999 he completes a doctorate with a thesis titled Ensemble Methods for Neural Clustering and Classification.
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1995
A Kurt Gödel scholarship in Adelaide
He visits the Knowledge-Based Engineering Systems Group in Adelaide in 1995 on a Kurt Gödel scholarship, and there he learns about R.
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1997
Joining R Core and CRAN
He joins the R Core Development Team in 1997, and he and Kurt Hornik implement R's package management system and co-found CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network.
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1999–2004
Vienna meetings for R users
He and Kurt Hornik organize the inaugural Distributed Statistical Computing workshop in Vienna in March 1999. He co-organizes the DSC conferences of 2001 and 2003 and the first useR! conference in 2004.
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2003
First R Foundation Secretary General
He becomes the first Secretary General of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing when it is formed in 2003.
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2006–2010
Professor at LMU Munich
He moves to LMU Munich in 2006 as a professor of computational statistics and becomes head of the department in 2010.
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2011
Heading BOKU's Institute of Statistics
He returns to Vienna in 2011 to join BOKU University as head of the Institute of Statistics. His research covers finite mixture models and cluster analysis.
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2024
Death after a serious illness
He dies in 2024 after a serious illness.
Sources and credits
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