In Greek mythology, Procrustes ("the stretcher") was a bandit from Attica killed by Theseus. In Eleusis, he had a bed which he invited passersby to lie down in. When they did so, he either stretched them or cut off body parts to make them fit into the bed. He continued this until he encountered Theseus and ended up in his own bed.

Procrustes was only a nickname for Damastus or Polypemon.

Any attempt to reduce men to one standard, one way of thinking, or one way of acting, is called placing them on Procrustes' bed, and the person who makes the attempt is called Procrustes.

Ovid VII, 438.

The moral of the story is used as a metaphor for life: I make my own bed, and lie in it.

Procrustes analysis is the name for the process of performing a shape preserving Euclidean transformation to a set of shapes. This removes variations in translation, rotation and scaling across the dataset, so to move them into a common frame of reference. This is generally the precursor to further statistical analysis.