The author of Clustan is David Wishart, Technical Director of Clustan Ltd and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Management, University of St. Andrews.

David's interest in customer relationship management started with the paper round, where his customers were classified according to whether or not they gave him a tip at Christmas.  Fortunately, the former greatly outnumbered the latter, which proved to be a major entrepreneurial encouragement.

His work on Clustan began with his Ph.D. dissertation in Numerical Taxonomy at the University of St. Andrews, 1966-70.  Early references can be found in a Colloquium on Numerical Taxonomy held at St. Andrews, 1968 (Cole, Academic Press); in Biometrics, 1969; and Computer Contribution 38, University of Kansas, 1969.  The Clustan User Manual has been published in four editions, 1969-87.

David subsequently served as Director of Statistics, Chief Statistician and Assistant Secretary at the Scotland Office in Edinburgh.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and was appointed a Vice President, 1986-89.  He holds Fellowships of the British Computer Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).  Dr Wishart is both a Chartered Statistician and a Chartered Software Engineer (BCS), and has co-chaired COMPSTAT, IFCS, BCS and WQD conferences.

Clustan has progressed through several versions for many computer systems in the past 30 years. ClustanGraphics was designed in the late 1990s, specifically to utilize the graphical user interface of Windows 95 and NT.  It was first presented at the 2^nd IASC Congress in Pasadena, USA in February 1997, and has been distributed since November 1997.  The first research paper was published in Computing Science and Statistics, 29(2), 1997.

ClustanGraphics was presented at PADD '98 in London, the Biometrics 50^th Anniversary Conference in Edinburgh 1998, British Classification Society '98 in Edinburgh, GfKl '98 in Dresden, Interface '98 in Minneapolis, ISI '99 in Helsinki and GfKl 2000 in Passau.  Associated abstracts and research papers appear in the proceedings of these conferences, and are reproduced in White Papers.

David currently spends much of his time designing Clustan software.  In his spare time he teaches a MasterClass on clustering at St. Andrews, classifies malt whiskies, walks the dog, enjoys his new status as Grandpa and fits in the occasional round of golf.  It's a class act (though sadly, not the golf).