Wold at the Frankfurt meeting in 1987 (photo P. Geladi).
It is with deep sorrow that the Chemometrics Society announces the death of Professor emeritus Herman Wold. Herman Wold contributed substantially to the methodology of Chemometrics through his work in Statistics and Econometrics. His pioneering work on the PLS method for generalized modelling and regression was instrumental for some major developments in Chemometrics.
Herman Wold was born on 25 December 1908 in Skien, Norway. He studied at the University of Stockholm under Harald Cram& (the famous statistician) and defended his PhD thesis 'A study in the analysis of stationary time series' in 1938. Herman is still widely recognized for this theorem on the decomposition of time series. In 1940 he married Anna-Lisa Arrhenius. They had three children, two girls and one boy (Svante Wold). The early work of Herman involved fix-point theory and multiblock and multivariate analysis in econometrics. In 1964 he invented his famous NIPALS algorithm for iterative one-by-one calculation of principal components. The developments around this algorithm led to its use for connecting many blocks of data, i.e. PLS that formed the basis of the early work of some of the pioneers 0 1992 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.