What is R?
01-A: What is R?
R is a statistical program and environment that is free, in-demand and a powerful comptuation and visualization tool.
According to the The R - Project for Statistical Computing:
"R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics..R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible."
One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed."
Video (6:43)
01-B: Why is it called R?
"R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently developed by the R Development Core Team, of which Chambers is a member. R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S. R is a GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) project." (http://mercury.webster.edu/aleshunas/R_learning_infrastructure/Introduction_to_R_and_RStudio.html)