The R Book

Acknowledgements

S is an elegant, widely accepted, and enduring software system with outstanding conceptual integrity, thanks to the insight, taste, and effort of John Chambers. In 1998, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presented him with its Software System Award, for ‘the S system, which has forever altered the way people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data’. R was inspired by the S environment that was developed by John Chambers, and which had substantial input from Douglas Bates, Rick Becker, Bill Cleveland, Trevor Hastie, Daryl Pregibon and Allan Wilks.

R was initially written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Subsequently, a large group of individuals contributed to R by sending code and bug reports. John Chambers graciously contributed advice and encouragement in the early days of R, and later became a member of the core team. The current R is the result of a collaborative effort with contributions from all over the world.

Since mid-1997 there has been a core group known as the ‘R Core Team’ who can modify the R source code archive. The group currently consists of Doug Bates, John Chambers, Peter Dalgaard, Robert Gentleman, Kurt Hornik, Stefano Iacus, Ross Ihaka, Friedrich Leisch, Thomas Lumley, Martin Maechler, Duncan Murdoch, Paul Murrell, Martyn Plummer, Brian Ripley, Duncan Temple Lang, Luke Tierney, and Simon Urbanek.

R would not be what it is today without the invaluable ...