Yihui Xie (Chinese: ) is a Chinese statistician and data scientist . He is the main author of the open-source Knitr package for data analysis in the R programming language, and has also written the book Dynamic Documents with R and knitr. He works as a software engineer for RStudio.
Yihui Xie graduated from Renmin University of China with a bachelor's degree in Economics and master's degree in Statistics. He has a Ph.D from Iowa State University with advisors Di Cook and Heike Hofmann.
Yihui Xie created the animation package in R which allows animation in graphics through R. He then authored the knitr package which makes reproducible research available from R. Since 2013, he has been working with RStudio, the makers of the RStudio IDE for the R programming language.
He has been awarded the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, ASA, 2009 (for the R package animation).