Contributors

The current R is the result of a collaborative effort with contributions from all over the world. R was initially written by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka—also known as “R & R” of the Statistics Department of the University of Auckland. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group, the R Core Team, with write access to the R source, currently consisting of

  • John Chambers
  • Peter Dalgaard
  • Robert Gentleman
  • Kurt Hornik
  • Ross Ihaka
  • Tomas Kalibera
  • Michael Lawrence
  • Friedrich Leisch
  • Uwe Ligges
  • Thomas Lumley
  • Martin Maechler
  • Sebastian Meyer
  • Paul Murrell
  • Martyn Plummer
  • Brian Ripley
  • Deepayan Sarkar
  • Duncan Temple Lang
  • Luke Tierney
  • Simon Urbanek

plus Heiner Schwarte up to October 1999, Guido Masarotto up to June 2003, Stefano Iacus up to July 2014, Seth Falcon up to August 2015, Duncan Murdoch up to September 2017, Martin Morgan up to June 2021, and Douglas Bates up to March 2024.

R would not be what it is today without the invaluable help of these people outside of the (former and current) R Core team, who contributed by donating code, bug fixes and documentation:

Valerio Aimale, Suharto Anggono, Thomas Baier, Gabe Becker, Henrik Bengtsson, Roger Bivand, Ben Bolker, David Brahm, Göran Broström, Patrick Burns, Vince Carey, Saikat DebRoy, Matt Dowle, Brian D’Urso, Lyndon Drake, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Claus Ekstrom, Sebastian Fischmeister, John Fox, Paul Gilbert, Yu Gong, Gabor Grothendieck, Frank E Harrell Jr, Peter M. Haverty, Torsten Hothorn, Robert King, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Roger Koenker, Philippe Lambert, Jan de Leeuw, Jim Lindsey, Patrick Lindsey, Catherine Loader, Gordon Maclean, Arni Magnusson, John Maindonald, David Meyer, Ei-ji Nakama, Jens Oehlschägel, Steve Oncley, Richard O’Keefe, Hubert Palme, Roger D. Peng, José C. Pinheiro, Tony Plate, Anthony Rossini, Jonathan Rougier, Petr Savicky, Günther Sawitzki, Marc Schwartz, Arun Srinivasan, Detlef Steuer, Bill Simpson, Gordon Smyth, Adrian Trapletti, Terry Therneau, Rolf Turner, Bill Venables, Gregory R. Warnes, Andreas Weingessel, Morten Welinder, James Wettenhall, Simon Wood, and Achim Zeileis.

Others have written code that has been adopted by R and is acknowledged in the code files, including

J. D. Beasley, David J. Best, Richard Brent, Kevin Buhr, Michael A. Covington, Bill Cleveland, Robert Cleveland,, G. W. Cran, C. G. Ding, Ulrich Drepper, Paul Eggert, J. O. Evans, David M. Gay, H. Frick, G. W. Hill, Richard H. Jones, Eric Grosse, Shelby Haberman, Bruno Haible, John Hartigan, Andrew Harvey, Trevor Hastie, Min Long Lam, George Marsaglia, K. J. Martin, Gordon Matzigkeit, C. R. Mckenzie, Jean McRae, Cyrus Mehta, Fionn Murtagh, John C. Nash, Finbarr O’Sullivan, R. E. Odeh, William Patefield, Nitin Patel, Alan Richardson, D. E. Roberts, Patrick Royston, Russell Lenth, Ming-Jen Shyu, Richard C. Singleton, S. G. Springer, Supoj Sutanthavibul, Irma Terpenning, G. E. Thomas, Rob Tibshirani, Wai Wan Tsang, Berwin Turlach, Gary V. Vaughan, Michael Wichura, Jingbo Wang, M. A. Wong, and the Free Software Foundation (for autoconf code and utilities). See also files under src/extras.

Many more, too numerous to mention here, have contributed by sending bug reports and suggesting various improvements.

Simon Davies whilst at the University of Auckland wrote the original version of glm().

Julian Harris and Wing Kwong (Tiki) Wan whilst at the University of Auckland assisted Ross Ihaka with the original Macintosh port.

R was inspired by the S environment which has been principally developed by John Chambers, with substantial input from Douglas Bates, Rick Becker, Bill Cleveland, Trevor Hastie, Daryl Pregibon and Allan Wilks.

A special debt is owed to John Chambers who has graciously contributed advice and encouragement in the early days of R and later became a member of the core team.

Stefano Iacus (a former member of R Core) and Simon Urbanek developed the macOS port, including the R.app GUI, toolchains and packaging.

The Windows port was developed by Guido Masarotto (for a while a member of R Core) and Brian Ripley, then Duncan Murdoch (a former member of R Core) and currently by Jeroen Ooms (base) and Uwe Ligges (packages).

Tomas Kalibera’s work has been sponsored by Jan Vitek and funded by his European Research Council grant “Evolving Language Ecosystems (ELE)”.

Computing support (including hardware, hosting and infrastructure) has been provided/funded by the R Foundation, employers of R-Core members (notably WU Wien, ETH Zurich, U Oxford and U Iowa) and by Northeastern University and the University of Kent.

Distributions of R contain the recommended packages, whose authors/contributors are listed in their DESCRIPTION files.