This article remembers our friend and colleague Fritz Leisch (1968–2024) who sadly died earlier this year. Many of the readers of The R Journal will know Fritz as a member of the R Core Team and for many of his contributions to the R community. For us, the co-authors of this article, he was an important companion on our journey with the R project and other scientific endeavours over the years. In the following, we provide a brief synopsis of his career, present his key contributions to the R project and to the scientific community more generally, acknowledge his academic service, and highlight his teaching and mentoring achievements.
Friedrich Leisch (see Figure 1) was born 1968 in Vienna (Austria) and died after serious illness in 2024 in Vienna. Everyone called him Fritz.
Figure 1: Fritz Leisch at his inaugural lecture at BOKU in 2011. Source: BOKU.
Starting in 1987, Fritz studied Applied Mathematics at Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien), earning his master’s degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in 1993. Subsequently, he joined the Department of Statistics and Probability Theory at TU Wien as an assistant professor which he continued to be, with short intermissions, until 2006. During this time he also defended his doctoral thesis in Applied Mathematics (Dr.techn.) in 1999 and earned his habilitation (venia docendi) in Statistics in 2005.
In 1995, he visited the Knowledge-Based Engineering Systems Group at the University of South-Australia in Adelaide on a Kurt Gödel scholarship for postgraduate studies. From 1997 to 2004 he was a member of the SFB project “Adaptive Information Systems and Modeling in Economics and Management Science”, coordinated at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Wien). From 2002 to 2003 he was assistant professor at the Department of Statistics and Decision Support Systems, Universität Wien.
In 2006 Fritz moved to Munich, Germany, to become a professor for computational statistics at the Department of Statistics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), see Figure 2. He returned to Vienna in 2011 to join the BOKU University as head of the Institute of Statistics, see Figure 3.
Figure 2: Computational statistics group at LMU in 2007 (left to right): Sebastian Kaiser, Adrian Duffner, Manuel Eugster, Fritz Leisch. Source: Carolin Strobl.