This is a live streaming of the public lecture broadcast from the University of Auckland. There will be food and drink from 6pm prior to the lecture start at 6.30pm.

The forward pipe operator ‘%>%’ was introduced to R by the ‘magrittr’ package and has since become an integral part of many data science workflows. Forward pipe operators have also been introduced in other languages in recent years. R 4.1.0 added a new forward pipe operator ‘|>’ to the base R language. This talk will review the history of forward pipe operators in R and other languages, and explain the motivation and design decisions behind the new operator.

Luke Tierney is Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Iowa. He has been a member of the R Core Team since 1998. His research has focused mainly on two aspects of computational methods and tools to support statistical analysis. The first area involves developing computational methods, based on approximations and simulation methods, for carrying out Bayesian data analysis. The second involves designing, developing, and maintaining computing environments for statistics and data science.