ABSTRACT
The term “chemometrics” was coined more than 30 years ago in 1971 by Svante Wold. Through his collaborations with Bruce Kowalski, they recognized the importance of this new field and formed the International Chemometrics Society in 1974. Together, they are considered to be the founders of a new subdiscipline called chemometrics. The term “chemometrics” first appeared in the chemical literature in 1975 [1, 2]. These early pioneers recognized the power of multivariate methods for uncovering hidden relationships between variables and objects. In the beginning, their research in the area of chemometrics focused on pattern recognition methods and applications [3-5], principal component analysis [6], and partial least-squares [7], among other topics. In the previous 12 chapters of this book, various authors have covered the most important topics of chemometrics, including those listed above, that were used by the earliest pioneers of the field. The methods described by these early authors and the applications they addressed are just as relevant, useful, and important today as they were 30 years ago.
