Jean-Paul Benzécri was a French mathematician and statistician. He studied at École Normale Supérieure and was professor at Université de Rennes and later for most of his career at the Paris Institute of Statistics (l'Institut de Statistique de l'Université de Paris), Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris. He is most known for his specific inductive approach to data analysis which led to the creation of Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique for analyzing contingency tables and for the invention of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm for agglomerative hierarchical clustering. 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) 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, after a 4 months study he submitted a Ph.D. thesis in differential geometry entitled Variétés localement plates under the supervision of Henri Cartan. From 1959 until 1960 he did conscripted military service in the Operational Research Group of the French Navy 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. Career Benzécri's teaching career began in 1963 as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Sciences in Rennes where he created a course in mathematical linguistics. One of his first students was Brigitte Escofier-Cordier who published in 1965 a dissertation entitled Analyse Factorielle des Correspondances (Correspondence analysis) 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. 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 (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