Statistical analysis and data display at the geochemical prospecting research centre and applied geochemistry research group, imperial college, London

摘要

The Imperial College of Science and Technology, a constituent college of the University of London in the 1960s, had the good fortune to be one of the first colleges in the United Kingdom to have access to digital computing facilities. This review traces the history of the application of computing in the Geochemical Prospecting Research Centre and its successor, the Applied Geochemistry Research Group, as computing moved from being a frontier research area to becoming a commonplace tool. The three principal areas in which it was involved comprised: The quality control, and thereby assurance, of analytical data; The production of pioneering atlases of regional geochemical variation in Northern Ireland (1973) and England and Wales (1978); And the application of methods introduced by workers in pattern-recognition and statistics to the interpretation of land-based and marine regional geochemical data.