John M. Chambers, Statistical Computing: History and Trends, The American Statistician, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Nov., 1980), pp. 238-243 ...

If you are interested in learning more about statistical functions in R and how to slice and dice your data, there are a number of books and academic downloads with more details.

Statistical mechanics provides a fundamental framework for understanding how collective phenomena in many-body systems give rise to macroscopic changes in state, known as phase transitions.