Consider the array a: > a <- array(c(1:9, 1:9), c(3,3,2)) > a , , 1 [,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] 1 4 7 [2,] 2 5 8 [3,] 3 6 9 , , 2 [,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] 1 4 7 [2,] 2 5 8 [3,] 3 6 9 How do we efficiently compute the row sums of the matrices indexed by the third dimension, such that the result is: [,1] [,2] [1,] 12 12 [2,] 15 15 [3,] 18 18 ?? The column sums are easy via the 'dims' argument of colSums(): > colSums(a, dims = 1) but I cannot find a way to use rowSums() on the array to achieve the desired result, as it has a different interpretation of 'dims' to that of colSums(). It is simple to compute the desired row sums using: > apply(a, 3, rowSums) [,1] [,2] [1,] 12 12 [2,] 15 15 [3,] 18 18 but that is just hiding the loop. Are there other efficient, truly vectorised, ways of computing the required row sums?