Chemometrics is the application of mathematical, statistical, and other logic- based methods to the field of chemistry. The term was coined in the early 1970s to describe the growing use of these approaches in chemistry.

Individual researchers were performing what later became known as chemometrics for several decades before it became a formal field of study. One of the first was William Gossett, a brewmaster at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland. In 1908, he published the statistical methods (the t- test and later the F-test) that he developed to improve the quality and taste of Guinness beer. In the 1940s and 1950s, Jack Youdan and Grant Wernimont performed data analysis and wrote articles and books on quality control. George Box, who later became a famous statistician, began his career performing biochemical determinations on the effect of poisonous gases on small animals during World War II. His tests produced...