John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S.^[1]

Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.^[1][2][3]

Chambers started at Bell Laboratories in 1966 as a member of its technical staff.^[1][3] From 1981 to 1983, he was the head of its Advanced Software Department and from 1983 to 1989 he was the head of its Statistics and Data Analysis Research Department.^[1][3] In 1989, he moved back to full-time research and in 1995, he became a distinguished member of the technical staff.^[1][3] In 1997, he was made the first Fellow of Bell Labs and was cited for "pioneering contributions to the field of statistical computing".^[1] He remained a distinguished member of the technical staff and a Fellow until his retirement from Bell Labs in 2005.^[3]

After retiring from Bell Labs, Chambers became a visiting professor at the University of Auckland, University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford University.^[3][4] Since 2008, he has been active at Stanford, currently serving as Senior Advisor of its data science program and an adjunct professor in Stanford's Department of Statistics.^[3]

Chambers is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.^[3][2]

Chambers has received the following awards:

• 1998, awarded the ACM Software System Award for developing the S programming language. The award was presented on May 15, 1999.^[1]
• 2004, awarded an honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo^[3]

Following his 1998 ACM Software System Award, Chambers donated his prize money (US$10,000) to the American Statistical Association to endow an award for novel statistical software, the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award.^[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, Calif: Wadsworth International Group. ISBN 0-534-98052-X.
• Chambers, John M. (1984). Compstat lectures: lectures in computational statistics. Heidelberg: Physica. ISBN 3-7051-0006-8.
• Becker, R.A.; Chambers, J.M. (1984). S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics. Pacific Grove, CA, USA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-03313-X.
• Becker, R.A.; Chambers, J.M. (1985). Extending the S System. Pacific Grove, CA, USA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-05016-6.
• Becker, R.A.; Chambers, J.M.; Wilks, A.R. (1988). The New S Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics. Pacific Grove, CA, USA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. ISBN 0-534-09192-X.
• Chambers, J.M.; Hastie, T.J. (1991). Statistical Models in S. Pacific Grove, CA, USA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. p. 624. ISBN 0-412-05291-1.
• Chambers, John M. (1998). Programming with data: a guide to the S language. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98503-4.
• Chambers, John M. (2008). Software for data analysis programming with R. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-75935-7.
• Chambers, John M. (2016). Extending R. Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC. p. 382. ISBN 978-1498775717.