A short history of chemometrics: a personal view

Historical reviews of chemometrics are primarily concerned with personalities. This article differs in that it focuses primarily on financial aspects, examining how chemometrics has developed since its seed in the 1960s, because of issues of funding. It tries to quantify the number of people worldwide encountering the subject through analysis of numbers of publications and conference attendance and illustrates the gap between a small core of experts that has hardly changed in number to a much larger and growing user base that often has limited statistical experience. It also identifies a growing trend for fundamental chemometrics in developing nations but a relative decline in more established countries such as North Europe and America.