R creators awarded $1 million prize

The R Core Team was awarded the biennial Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, which includes a monetary award of $1 million:

R started in the early nineties, when Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka created another implementation of S, for which John Chambers would receive the 1998 Software System Award of the Association for Computing Machinery. Initially meant for classroom use and to allow experiments with the computer language itself, their initiative was soon joined by volunteers from academia sharing a vision of together developing an open source, state-of-the-art system, freely available on all major software platforms.

Since mid-1997, this `R Core Team’ has been stewarding the development of the core systems of R. A subset of the R Core Team created and keeps maintaining the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) which provides an actively maintained repository of over 23,000 interoperable packages that work with current and development versions of the base system. It has extensive graphics capabilities. It is also the basis of the Bioconductor software for research on genomic data.

Well deserved.