Hadley Wickham is famous.
The kind of famous where people at statistics conferences line up for selfies, ask him for autographs, and are generally in awe of him.
Sureley that’s the best kind of famous. Or at least the next best kind. Dan Kopf posted an interview with Wickam recently titled Hadley Wickham, the Man Who Revolutionized R on Pricenomics (discovered via Data Elixir).
It’s a great read both for R enthusiasts like myself (this blog’s most popular post on Google, the heatmap of London school inspection results was done in R) and also as a general interest story.
What’s it like to be a rock star in a narrow field, in this case, R programming?
It’s utterly utterly bizarre … To be famous for writing R programs? It’s just crazy.
Not that crazy. Wickham is probably the single most prolific contributor to R and his code is being used at Google, Facebook, Twitter and even the New York Times. If I run into him at a conference, I’ll most definitely try and go for the celebrity selfie.