Jean-Paul Benzécri was a
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
and
statistician
A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors.
It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...
. He studied at
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
and was professor at
Université de Rennes and later for most of his career at the
Paris Institute of Statistics
Institut de Statistiques de l'Université de Paris (ISUP, roughly translated as "Paris Institute of Statistics" or literally to "Institute of Statistics of the University of Paris") is a graduate school of statistics based in Paris, in the fifth a ...
(l'Institut de Statistique de l'Université de Paris),
Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie
Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the La ...
in
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
. He is most known for his specific inductive approach to
data analysis
Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, enco ...
which led to the creation of
Correspondence analysis Correspondence analysis (CA) is a multivariate statistical technique proposed by Herman Otto Hartley (Hirschfeld) and later developed by Jean-Paul Benzécri. It is conceptually similar to principal component analysis, but applies to categorical rat ...
, a statistical technique for analyzing
contingency table
In statistics, a contingency table (also known as a cross tabulation or crosstab) is a type of table in a matrix format that displays the (multivariate) frequency distribution of the variables. They are heavily used in survey research, business i ...
s and for the invention of the
nearest-neighbor chain algorithm
In the theory of cluster analysis, the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm is an algorithm that can speed up several methods for agglomerative hierarchical clustering. These are methods that take a collection of points as input, and create a hierar ...
for
agglomerative hierarchical clustering
In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into tw ...
.
Early life
Jean-Paul Benzécri was born in
Oran, Algeria, in 1932, where his father was a doctor. He attended high school in Lycée Lamoricière, Oran and Lycée Bugeaud, Alger. In 1950, he was first in the entrance examination to the ENS (
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
) in Paris and again in 1953 to the "Agrégation de Mathématiques", a national teacher's diploma examination. He then did some science research in mathematics. Leaving for the United States in 1955 for
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
, after a 4 months study he submitted a Ph.D. thesis in differential geometry entitled ''Variétés localement plates'' under the supervision of
Henri Cartan
Henri Paul Cartan (; 8 July 1904 – 13 August 2008) was a French mathematician who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology.
He was the son of the mathematician Élie Cartan, nephew of mathematician Anna Cartan, oldest brother of co ...
.
From 1959 until 1960 he did conscripted military service in the Operational Research Group of the
French Navy
The French Navy (french: Marine nationale, lit=National Navy), informally , is the maritime arm of the French Armed Forces and one of the five military service branches of France. It is among the largest and most powerful naval forces in t ...
where he practiced multidimensional data modeling by traditional analytical methods without the use of a computer. In 1960 he delivered a "Doctorat" at Sorbonne, Paris entitled ''Sur les variétés localement affines et localement projectives'' again under the supervision of
Henri Cartan
Henri Paul Cartan (; 8 July 1904 – 13 August 2008) was a French mathematician who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology.
He was the son of the mathematician Élie Cartan, nephew of mathematician Anna Cartan, oldest brother of co ...
.
Career
Benzécri's teaching career began in 1963 as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Sciences in
Rennes
Rennes (; br, Roazhon ; Gallo: ''Resnn''; ) is a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France at the confluence of the Ille and the Vilaine. Rennes is the prefecture of the region of Brittany, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine department ...
where he created a course in mathematical linguistics. One of his first students was
Brigitte Escofier-Cordier
Brigitte is a feminine given name. Notable people with the name include:
* Brigitte Amm, German rower
* Brigitte Bardot (born 1934), a French actress and singer
* Brigitte Becue (born 1972), a Belgian breaststroke swimmer
* Brigitte Bierlein (bor ...
who published in 1965 a dissertation entitled ''Analyse Factorielle des Correspondances (
Correspondence analysis Correspondence analysis (CA) is a multivariate statistical technique proposed by Herman Otto Hartley (Hirschfeld) and later developed by Jean-Paul Benzécri. It is conceptually similar to principal component analysis, but applies to categorical rat ...
)'' with application to textual data.
In 1965, Benzécri became professor at the Sorbonne and founded the Laboratoire de Statistique inside the
Paris Institute of Statistics
Institut de Statistiques de l'Université de Paris (ISUP, roughly translated as "Paris Institute of Statistics" or literally to "Institute of Statistics of the University of Paris") is a graduate school of statistics based in Paris, in the fifth a ...
. His initial course in "Analyse des Données" evolved into a full scale MS-PhD program which was the basis of his research activity.
Research
Since his early work in 1963 on
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
(NLP), Benzécri got the intuition that electronic computing was going to be the ''Novius Organum'' (i.e., the new tool) enabling to solve the problem cooperatively between mathematics, logic and linguistics. Inspired by the pionneering works of
Louis Guttman and Chikio Hayashi as well as by the distributional methodology of
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...
, he devised a geometric equivalence to these approaches by searching the principal axes of inertia of a weighted cloud of points. These algorithms were the primary building blocks of a method which he later called "
Correspondence analysis Correspondence analysis (CA) is a multivariate statistical technique proposed by Herman Otto Hartley (Hirschfeld) and later developed by Jean-Paul Benzécri. It is conceptually similar to principal component analysis, but applies to categorical rat ...
". Developing correspondence analysis with the systematic supplement of
clustering techniques, his interest went to analysing both large contingency and binary tables and some other kinds of data arrays after suitable transformation including lexical tables derived from raw texts.
Favouring induction over hypothesis testing, much of his approach lies in describing and understanding how a multidimensional dataset diverges from the hypothesis of independence of its rows and columns through the interpretation of patterns often revealed by point cloud graphic displays. But he was also opened to reintroduce a new statistical framework into this purely exploratory process by deriving an ''a posteriori'' projection of supplementary variables (i.e. rows) and individuals (i.e. rows). His early familiarity with computers and their programming languages lead him to adopt tensor notations and quasi
ALGOL-like algorithmic formulas in his course texts as early as 1967. This facilitated the transcription of his concepts by his fellow colleagues and students to computer programs in a wide range of languages, the latest being a wide variety on implementations in R language such as FactoMiner. Benzecri's tensor notations were precursors to the latest developments of
tensor calculus for machine learning (for example,
TensorFlow). In the field of
clustering methods, Benzécri (1982)
also proposed a new algorithm (nearest-neighbor chain algorithm) for agglomerative hierarchical clustering.
Selected publications
* ''L'Analyse des données''. Tome 1 : ''La Taxinomie'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1973, 615 p.
* ''L'Analyse des données''. Tome 2 : ''L'Analyse des correspondances'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1973, 619 p.
* ''Histoire et préhistoire de l'analyse des données'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1982, 159 p.
* ''L'Analyse des données / leçons sur l'analyse factorielle et la reconnaissance des formes et travaux'',
** Vol. 1 : ''L'Analyse des correspondances'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1982, 635 p.
** Vol. 2 : ''La Taxinomie'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1982, 632 p.
* ''Pratique de l'analyse des données'',
** Tome I : ''Analyse des correspondances, exposé élémentaire'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1980,
** Tome II : ''Abrégé théorique, études de cas modèles'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1980, 466 p.
** Tome III : ''Linguistique et lexicologie'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1981, 565 p.
** Tome IV : ''En médecine, pharmacologie, physiologie clinique'', Statmatic, Paris, 199, 532 p.
** Tome V : ''Pratique de l'analyse des données en économie'',
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1987, 533 p.
* ''Les cahiers de l'analyse des données'', Gauthier-Villars,
Dunod Dunod is a given name. Notable people with the name include:
*Dunod Fawr
Dynod son of Pabo ( cy, Dynod or ''Dunod ap Pabo''; la, Dunaunt; died c. 595), better known as Dynod the Stout ( cy, Dynod Bwr) or Dynod Fawr was the ruler o ...
, 1976–1997
* ''Linguistique et lexicologie'', Dunod, 2007
é-édition
Only one manual was published in English under the direct supervision of Benzécri near the end of his university career.
* ''Correspondence analysis handbook'',
Marcel Dekker
Marcel Dekker was a journal and encyclopedia publishing company with editorial boards found in New York City. Dekker encyclopedias are now published by CRC Press, part of the Taylor and Francis publishing group.
History
Initially a textbook pu ...
(1992), 665 p.
References
External links
*
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Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
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WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCL ...
ID
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OCLC
OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was ...
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VIAF (Virtual International Authority File)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Benzecri, Jean-Paul
1932 births
2019 deaths
French statisticians
20th-century French mathematicians
21st-century French mathematicians
People from Oran
École Normale Supérieure alumni
University of Rennes faculty
Pierre and Marie Curie University faculty
Paris-Sorbonne University alumni
Computational linguistics researchers
Data miners