How to convert a matrix to a list of column-vectors in R?

Gavin's answer is simple and elegant. But if there are many columns, a much faster solution would be:

lapply(seq_len(ncol(x)), function(i) x[,i])

The speed difference is 6x in the example below:

> x <- matrix(1:1e6, 10)
> system.time( as.list(data.frame(x)) )
   user  system elapsed 
   1.24    0.00    1.22 
> system.time( lapply(seq_len(ncol(x)), function(i) x[,i]) )
   user  system elapsed 
    0.2     0.0     0.2 

In the interests of skinning the cat, treat the array as a vector as if it had no dim attribute:

 split(x, rep(1:ncol(x), each = nrow(x)))

data.frames are stored as lists, I believe. Therefore coercion seems best:

as.list(as.data.frame(x))
> as.list(as.data.frame(x))
$V1
[1] 1 2 3 4 5

$V2
[1]  6  7  8  9 10

Benchmarking results are interesting. as.data.frame is faster than data.frame, either because data.frame has to create a whole new object, or because keeping track of the column names is somehow costly (witness the c(unname()) vs c() comparison)? The lapply solution provided by @Tommy is faster by an order of magnitude. The as.data.frame() results can be somewhat improved by coercing manually.

manual.coerce <- function(x) {
  x <- as.data.frame(x)
  class(x) <- "list"
  x
}

library(microbenchmark)
x <- matrix(1:10,ncol=2)

microbenchmark(
  tapply(x,rep(1:ncol(x),each=nrow(x)),function(i)i) ,
  as.list(data.frame(x)),
  as.list(as.data.frame(x)),
  lapply(seq_len(ncol(x)), function(i) x[,i]),
  c(unname(as.data.frame(x))),
  c(data.frame(x)),
  manual.coerce(x),
  times=1000
  )

                                                      expr     min      lq
1                                as.list(as.data.frame(x))  176221  183064
2                                   as.list(data.frame(x))  444827  454237
3                                         c(data.frame(x))  434562  443117
4                              c(unname(as.data.frame(x)))  257487  266897
5             lapply(seq_len(ncol(x)), function(i) x[, i])   28231   35929
6                                         manual.coerce(x)  160823  167667
7 tapply(x, rep(1:ncol(x), each = nrow(x)), function(i) i) 1020536 1036790
   median      uq     max
1  186486  190763 2768193
2  460225  471346 2854592
3  449960  460226 2895653
4  271174  277162 2827218
5   36784   37640 1165105
6  171088  176221  457659
7 1052188 1080417 3939286

is.list(manual.coerce(x))
[1] TRUE