Plotting correlation/distance in a 2D space

["Benoist, Christophe" <Christophe.Benoist@joslin.harvard.edu>]

Dear colleagues,
We are looking for a function that would generate 2D spatial coordinates to 
reflect the correlation between a collection of objects.
The input is an NxN matrix that gives the correlation coefficients between any 
two of N elements. The goal would be to generate an Nx2 matrix that holds x and 
y coordinates for each element, optimized such that the distance between two 
elements in the 2D space is proportional (linear, other??) to the correlation 
coefficient. N is large (several hundreds or thousands). Apologies if this is a 
computationally or mathematically naive question.
Thanks,
Christophe Benoist

Christophe Benoist 
Joslin Diabetes Center
cb@joslin.harvard.edu