M2r was created at the American Mathematical Society's 2016 Mathematics Research Community gathering on algebraic statistics. It connects R to a persistent local or remote Macaulay2 session and leverages mpoly's existing infrastructure to provide wrappers for commonly used algebraic algorithms in a way that naturally fits into the R ecosystem, alleviating the need to learn Macaulay2. m2r provides a flexible framework for computations in the algebraic statistics community and beyond.