According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_Statistics : R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians for developing statistical software and data analysis. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as an implementation of the S programming language, created by John Chambers while at Bell Labs. Now, R is 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.
Here is a link to the official webpage of the R project: