Nominee's name or organisation:
Associate Professor Ross Ihaka
Overview of your nomination:
In computing, R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is an implementation of the S programming language created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman[2] at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now 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 (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly as a play on the name of S.[3] The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software,[4][5] and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis.[5] R is part of the GNU project. [6][7] Its source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface, though several graphical user interfaces are available.
Reasons for winning this award:
The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software, and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. It was conceived and developed by New Zealanders, they would be very worthy winners.
