List of Famous people named R

Parthiban is an Indian film actor, director, producer and writer who works mainly in Tamil cinema. He has directed 14 films, produced 12 films and acted in more than 60 films. He started his career as assistant director for K. Bhagyaraj in 1984 and the duo worked in over 20 films from 1984 to 1991.

Robert Canterbury Buford is an American basketball executive, currently CEO of the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was named general manager in 2002 after five seasons serving as team president. Buford is also the president of sports franchises for Spurs Sports & Entertainment. Buford has won the NBA Executive of the Year award twice, for the 2013–14 and 2015–16 seasons, before his promotion to CEO before the start of the 2019–20 season.

Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark text “Convex Analysis” (1970), which has been cited more than 27000 times according to Google Scholar and remains the standard reference on the subject, and "Variational Analysis" for which the authors received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Richard Brent Tully is an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Roberta Ann MacAvoy is an American fantasy and science fiction author. Several of her books draw on Celtic or Zen themes. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1984.

R. John Collier is an American microbiologist and biochemist. He is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiology, Emeritus at Harvard Medical School.

Robert James Woolsey Jr. headed the Central Intelligence Agency from February 5, 1993, until January 10, 1995. He held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including as United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979, and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. His career also included time as a professional lawyer, venture capitalist and investor in the private sector.

Robert Holmes "R. H." Thomson, is a Canadian television, film and stage actor. with a career spanning five decades he remains a regular presence on Canadian movie screens and television. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to the arts and war veterans.

Robert W. Goodwin, billed as R. W. Goodwin, is an Australian-born American television producer and director best known for his work as senior executive producer of The X-Files. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Robert Paul Butler is an astronomer who searches for extrasolar planets. As of November 2020, he and his team have discovered over half of the planets found orbiting nearby stars. He is also noted for his pioneering work in Doppler spectroscopy, a method used to detect stars having orbiting planets by measuring the "wobble" induced by the gravitational forces between the star and its orbiting planet(s).