Chemometrics and Bruce: Some Fond Memories

This chapter describes the transformation of a young physical organic chemist (SW, 1964), from a believer in first principles models to a middle-aged chemometrician (SW, 1974) promoting empirical and semiempirical "data driven, soft, analogy" models for the design of experiments and the analysis of the resulting data. This transformation was marked by a number of influential events, each tipping the balance towards the data driven, soft, analogy models until the point of no return in 1974. On June 10, 1974, Bruce and I together with our research groups joined forces formed the Chemometrics Society (later renamed to the International Chemometrics Society), and we took off into multidimensional space. This review of my personal scientific history, inspired and encouraged by Bruce, is illustrated by examples of method development driven by necessity to solve specific problems and leading to data driven soft models, which, at least in my own eyes, were superior to the classical first principles approaches to the same problems. Bruce and I met at numerous conferences between 1975 and 1990, but after that, Bruce and I gradually slid out of the academic world, and now Bruce has taken his final step.