  The history and current status of the cross-disciplinary fields of
astrostatistics and astroinformatics are reviewed. Astronomers need a wide
range of statistical methods for both data reduction and science analysis. With
the proliferation of high-throughput telescopes, efficient large scale
computational methods are also becoming essential. However, astronomers receive
only weak training in these fields during their formal education. Interest in
the fields is rapidly growing with conferences organized by scholarly
societies, textbooks and tutorial workshops, and research studies pushing the
frontiers of methodology. R, the premier language of statistical computing, can
provide an important software environment for the incorporation of advanced
statistical and computational methodology into the astronomical community.
