Yihui Xie
Yihui Xie (https://yihui.org) is a software engineer at RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com). He earned his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. He is interested in interactive statistical graphics and statistical computing. As an active R user, he has authored several R packages, such as knitr, bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, tinytex, rolldown, animation, DT, tufte, formatR, fun, xfun, testit, mime, highr, servr, and Rd2roxygen, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He also co-authored a few other R packages, including shiny, rmarkdown, pagedown, and leaflet.
He has authored two books, Dynamic Documents with knitr (Xie 2015), and bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown (Xie 2016), and co-authored two books, blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown (Xie, Hill, and Thomas 2017), and R Markdown: The Definitive Guide (Xie, Allaire, and Grolemund 2018).
In 2006, he founded the Capital of Statistics (https://cosx.org), which has grown into a large online community on statistics in China. He initiated the Chinese R conference in 2008, and has been involved in organizing R conferences in China since then. During his PhD training at Iowa State University, he won the Vince Sposito Statistical Computing Award (2011) and the Snedecor Award (2012) in the Department of Statistics.
He usually reads Twitter messages once a week (https://twitter.com/xieyihui), and most of the time you can find him on GitHub (https://github.com/yihui).
He has four hobbies: reading, writing (mostly blogging), cooking, and playing badminton. He is actually more interested in cooking than eating. There are not many types of food that he cannot resist eating, and spicy food is one of the few. Since cooking is more fun, he rarely goes to restaurants. When he does go and is asked “how spicy you want your food to be” in the restaurant, he usually answers “as spicy as your chef can make it to be.”