Springer Selected Contributions in Data Analysis and Classification (Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization)

By inviting me to write a preface, the organizers of the event in honour of Edwin Diday, have expressed their a?ection and I appreciate this very much. This gives me an opportunity to express my friendship and admiration for Edwin Diday, and I wrote this foreword with pleasure. My ?rst few meetings withEdwinDidaydatebackto1965through1975,daysofthedevelopmentof French statistics. This was a period when access to computers revolutionized the practice of statistics. This does not refer to individual computers or to terminals that have access to powerful networks. This was the era of the ?rst university calculation centres that one accessed over a counter. One would deposit cards on which program and data were punched in and come back a few hours or days later for the results. Like all those who used linear data analysis, the computer enabled me to calculate for each data set the value of mathematical objects (eigenvalues and eigenvectors for example) whose optimality properties had been demonstrated by mathematicians. It was - ready a big step to be able to do this in concrete experimental situations. With Dynamic Clustering Algorithm, Edwin Diday allowed us to discover that computers could be more than just a way of giving numerical values to known mathematical objects. Besides the e?ciency of the solutions he built, he led us to integrate the access to computers di?erently in the research and practice of data analysis.