In 1960, he was an assistant professor at the University of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine), and in 1965 he was promoted to a post at the Institut de statistique de l’université de Paris (ISUP). He developed correspondence analysis, which is used in many fields of research, particularly linguistics, sociology, history and archaeology—in short, in every discipline that seeks to make sense of a mass of data that the human mind could not otherwise assimilate.
The procedure begins by arranging the data in a table that brings together objects on one side and their descriptive variables on the other. Correspondence analysis is applied to this table to identify and reveal the dataset’s main structural features, represented graphically as point clouds projected onto various factor planes. This is an exploratory method that makes no assumptions about the result.
