Jean-Paul Benzécri
Jean-Paul Benzécri was born on February 28, 1932 in Oran, Algeria and died on November 24, 2019 in Villampuy. He was a French mathematician and statistician. He studied at École Normale Supérieure and has been professor at Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris. He is most famous for his specific inductive approach to Data Analysis which led to the creation of Correspondence Analysis, a statistical technique for analyzing contingency tables and the invention of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm for agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Scientists in disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology, linguistics, medicine, chemistry and biology, make constant use of approaches based on his work.
Jean-Paul Benzécri | |
|---|---|
 Jean-Paul Benzécri in 2009. | |
| Born | 28 February 1932 |
| Died | 24 November 2019 (aged 87) |
| Nationality | French |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie |
| Doctoral advisor | Henri Cartan |
Early life
Jean-Paul Benzécri was born in Oran (Algeria) in 1932, where his father was a doctor. In high school, both in Lycée Lamoricière, Oran and Lycée Bugeaud, Alger he was an exceptional student taken in admiration by his teachers, particularly in Mathematics, Latin and Greek. In 1950, he was the major of the entrance examination to the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in Paris (a selective higher education school of all disciplines in France and which has produced 11 Field medals and 13 Nobel prizes) and again in 1953 to the "Agrégation de Mathématiques", a national teacher's diploma examination. He then decided to complement his career with some science research in Mathematics which was not a common attitude at that time among his ENS alumni colleagues. Leaving for the United States in 1955 for Princeton University, after a 4 months study he submitted a Ph.D. thesis in differential geometry under the supervision of Henri Cartan a renown specialist in algebraic topology.[1]. Published later From 1959 until 1960 he does his conscripted military service in the Operational Research Group of the French Navy (Marine Nationale) where he will practice multidimensional data modeling by traditional analytical methods without the use of a computer.[2]
References
- L'Analyse des données. Tome 1 : La Taxinomie, Dunod, 1973, 615 p ISBN 2-04-007034-6
- L'Analyse des données. Tome 2 : L'Analyse des correspondances, Dunod, 1973, 619 p ISBN 2-04-007225-X
- Histoire et préhistoire de l'analyse des données, Dunod, 1982, ISBN 2-04-015467-1
- L'analyse des données / leçons sur l'analyse factorielle et la reconnaissance des formes et travaux, Dunod 1982, ISBN 2-04-015515-5
- Pratique de l'analyse des données,
- Tome I : Analyse des correspondances, exposé élémentaire, Dunod (1980), ISBN 2040157328.
- Tome II : Abrégé théorique, études de cas modèles, Dunod (1980).
- Tome III : Linguistique et lexicologie, Dunod (1981).
- Tome IV : En médecine, pharmacologie, physiologie clinique, Statmatic (1992)
- Tome V : Économie, Dunod (1987).
- Revue Les cahiers de l'analyse des données, Gauthier-Villars, Dunod, 1980–1990
- Linguistique et lexicologie, Dunod, 2007 [ré-édition], ISBN 2-04-010776-2
- Correspondence analysis handbook, Marcel Dekker (1992), 665 p ISBN 0824784375