Israeli statisticians who revolutionized data analysis win $1M prize despite protests

The biannual Rousseeuw Prize is awarded by the King Baudouin Foundation, a Brussels-based philanthropic organization.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

Three Israeli mathematicians officially received the prestigious Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in Belgium, where “protests by students and faculty members have called for a full academic boycott of Israeli universities,” Tel Aviv University announced on Wednesday.

The $1 million prize, established as an equivalent of the Nobel Prize which does not include mathematical disciplines, recognizes outstanding contributions in statistics that profoundly impact science and society.

Protesters demonstrated outside the ceremony at Catholic University of Leuven, which took place on Dec. 3, Tel Aviv University said.

Prof. Yoav Benjamini, Prof. Daniel Yekutieli and Prof. Ruth Heller from TAU’s Department of Statistics and Operations Research were honored for their work on the False Discovery Rate (FDR), a statistical methodology for discovering errors among large datasets.

Controlling the FDR ensures that the proportion of false positives remains within an acceptable range, making the results more reliable.

“The idea of the FDR originated from the need of medical researchers to examine numerous factors indicating treatment success,” said Benjamini.

“However, in statistics, once a new method is established in one research area, its impact can expand to others. Indeed, FDR methods are now widely applied in diverse fields such as: genomics—where relations between tens of thousands of genetic markers of a specific disease are examined; neuroscience – testing which regions in the brain are activated when a certain task, such as face recognition, is performed; agriculture, economics, behavioral sciences, astronomy, and more,” he explained

“What these fields share is the need to scan massive amounts of possible results within mountains of data to identify significant discoveries.”

The biannual Rousseeuw Prize is awarded by the King Baudouin Foundation, a Brussels-based philanthropic organization.