The R Project is a free software environment primarily used for statistical computing and data analysis. It provides a wide variety of tools for data manipulation, statistical modeling, and graphical representation, making it popular among statisticians, data scientists, and researchers. The programming language used in R is also called R, which allows users to write scripts and functions to automate their analyses. Developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland in the mid-1990s, the R Project has grown into a large community with numerous packages available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). These packages extend R's capabilities, enabling users to perform specialized analyses and visualize data in various ways.