Calling Vladimir Vapnik (the inventor of SVMs) a statistician simply because he studied it is somewhat disingenuous – he's been employed as a professor in computer science for pretty much all his life. Leo Breiman, who invented random forests, probably still identifies as a statistician, but also wrote the influential "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" where he makes a pretty severe break with traditional statistics. So you're being a bit charitable here :-)
