This book is the second edition of Modern Multidimensional Scaling. The first edition came out in 1997. As the authors point out, earlier versions of the book (with different combinations of authors, and in various languages) have been around since 1981. It is interesting to connect the various versions of the book with the history of multidimensional scaling (from now on MDS). For various reasons, MDS originated in psychometrics, and it was developed initially by psychometricians or mathematicians and statisticians working in psychometrics. It was soon
picked up by marketers and geographers, and quite a bit later by astronomers, geneticists, and chemists…