R is a language for statistical computing and graphics. It is the choice of Coursera Statistics One.

It can be installed on OS X via the pkg available on the main website which is my recommendation or via Homebrew.

I have been unable to get the homebrew version to install correctly.
On Mountain Lion the homebrew install also requires a few additional packages.

Install R with Homebrew

Update First run brew tap homebrew/science to make the R package available /Update

If you run brew install r when you do not have a fortran compiler you will see the following error:

This formula requires a fortran compiler, but we could not find one by looking at the FC environment variable or searching your PATH for gfortran. Please take one of the following actions:

  • Decide to use the build of gfortran 4.2.x provided by Homebrew using brew install gfortran

  • Choose another Fortran compiler by setting the FC environment variable: export FC=/path/to/some/fortran/compiler Using an alternative compiler may produce more efficient code, but we will not be able to provide support for build errors.

To save time just run :

brew update
brew install gfortran r

Although I ran into some issues with linking libtiff and jpeg and had to run:

brew link -f  libtiff jpeg
brew install r

I still got checksum fails. Might have to wait for a brew update.

If you are running Mountain Lion then you will also run into this:

Unsatisfied dependency: XQuartz Please install the latest version of XQuartz: https://xquartz.macosforge.org Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.

The easiest way to install R on OS X really does seem to be just run the package. 134MB install size.