Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a statistical technique used to transform correlated variables into uncorrelated principal components, facilitating applications in various fields such as machine learning, image processing, and data visualization. The document outlines PCA's mathematical foundation, including the use of eigenvalues and eigenvectors to identify principal components, and discusses its application to the Iris dataset and limitations with datasets like MNIST. PCA is particularly useful for dimensionality reduction while preserving variance, though its effectiveness depends on the correlation of the original variables.