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 with write access to the R source, currently consisting of
plus Heiner Schwarte up to October 1999, Guido Masarotto up to June 2003 and Stefano Iacus up to July 2014.
R would not be what it is today without the invaluable help of these people, who contributed by donating code, bug fixes and documentation:
Valerio Aimale, Thomas Baier, Henrik Bengtsson, Roger Bivand, Ben Bolker, David Brahm, Göran Broström, Patrick Burns, Vince Carey, Saikat DebRoy, Brian D'Urso, Lyndon Drake, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Claus Ekstrom, Sebastian Fischmeister, John Fox, Paul Gilbert, Yu Gong, Gabor Grothendieck, Frank E Harrell Jr, Torsten Hothorn, Robert King, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Roger Koenker, Philippe Lambert, Jan de Leeuw, Jim Lindsey, Patrick Lindsey, Catherine Loader, Gordon Maclean, 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, 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.
We have probably omitted some important names here because of incomplete record keeping. If we have overlooked you, please let us know and we'll update the list. 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.