John Chambers (statistician)

John McKinley Chambers (born April 28, 1941) is a statistician and software developer known for creating the S programming language at Bell Labs. S provided an interactive environment for statistical computing, data analysis and graphics; later systems influenced by it included R.¹²

Chambers joined Bell Labs in 1966 and spent most of his career there, becoming a distinguished member of technical staff and the first statistician named a Bell Labs Fellow.¹³ He received the 1998 ACM Software System Award for S and donated the award's $10,000 prize to the American Statistical Association to establish the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award for student work in statistical software.⁴⁵

Chambers was born in Toronto, Ontario, on April 28, 1941.⁶ He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963, then studied statistics at Harvard University, receiving a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD in 1966.¹

Chambers joined Bell Labs as a member of technical staff in 1966.¹ At Bell Labs, he worked in an environment where statistics, computing and research software were closely connected. His later account of S described it as originating in Bell Labs' statistics research group in 1976 as part of a computing environment for data-analysis research, rather than as a separate project to create a programming language.⁷

The S language became Chambers' central contribution to statistical computing. In its early form, S provided an interactive environment for data analysis and graphics; later versions developed a richer programming language and object-oriented features for statistical modeling.²⁸ Chambers and collaborators documented successive versions of the system in books including S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics (1984), The New S Language (1988), Statistical Models in S (1991), and Programming with Data (1998).²

Chambers held several research-leadership roles at Bell Labs. He headed its Advanced Software Department from 1981 to 1983 and its Statistics and Data Analysis Research Department from 1983 to 1989, before returning to full-time research. In 1995 he became a distinguished member of technical staff; two years later, Bell Labs named him its first statistician fellow, citing his contributions to statistical computing.¹ He retired from Bell Labs in 2005.¹

The open-source R language was originally designed as a language "not unlike" S, and Chambers later became a member of the R Core Team.⁷² His later books, including Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R (2008) and Extending R (2016), moved from documenting S toward explaining R as a platform for statistical software.²⁹

After retiring from Bell Labs, Chambers held visiting appointments at the University of Auckland, the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford University.¹ Since 2008, he has been affiliated with Stanford, where he is an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics and associated with Stanford Data Science.³ Stanford lists his research interests as statistical computing, data science and data visualization, with current work focused on R and related projects.³

Chambers is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.¹ He received an honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo in 2004.¹

The John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, endowed from Chambers' ACM prize money, is administered by the American Statistical Association's Joint Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics Section. The award recognizes student software written to support statistical computing.⁵

• Chambers, John M. (1977). Computational Methods for Data Analysis. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-02772-3.
• Chambers, John M. (1983). Graphical Methods for Data Analysis. Belmont, California: Wadsworth International Group. ISBN 0-534-98052-X.
• Becker, Richard A.; Chambers, John M. (1984). S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics. Pacific Grove, California: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-03313-X.
• Becker, Richard A.; Chambers, John M.; Wilks, Allan R. (1988). The New S Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics. Pacific Grove, California: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-09192-X.
• Chambers, John M.; Hastie, Trevor J. (1991). Statistical Models in S. Pacific Grove, California: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-412-05291-1.
• Chambers, John M. (1998). Programming with Data: A Guide to the S Language. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98503-4.
• Chambers, John M. (2008). Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R. New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-75935-7.
• Chambers, John M. (2016). Extending R. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1-4987-7571-7.