He became an assistant professor at the University of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine) in 1960 and was appointed to the Institute of Statistics at the University of Paris (ISUP) in 1965. He developed correspondence analysis, a method used in many fields of research, particularly linguistics, sociology, history and archaeology—in short, wherever meaning must be extracted from an accumulation of data that the human mind would otherwise be unable to assimilate.
The procedure begins by arranging the data in a table, with objects on one side and their descriptive variables on the other. Correspondence analysis is then applied to this table to identify and reveal the dataset’s main structural features, represented graphically as point clouds projected onto various factor planes. The method is exploratory and makes no assumptions about the outcome.
