Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary

A scientific revolution began at the end of the 18th century with the creation and popularization of the graphic display of data by Scottish inventor William Playfair, who introduced the line graph, bar chart, and pie chart into statistics. His remarkable Atlas demonstrated how much could be learned if one plotted data graphically and looked for suggestive patterns to provide evidence for pursuing research. In the Statistical Breviary, Playfair invented the pie chart and expanded upon this concept to facilitate the comparison of the resources of European countries. Playfair's work has great relevance to contemporary science, but finding copies of his original versions is very difficult. This re-issuance of two of his classic works, with new explanatory material, allows access to his wisdom for the first time in two centuries. In full color exactly as Playfair hand-colored the original, this volume includes exact duplicates of the third edition of his classic Atlas as well as the Statistical Breviary. An additional feature is the inclusion of annotations and an extensive biography of the remarkable inventor. Howard Wainer is Distinquished Research Scientist at the National Board of Examiners and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has a Ph.D. in Psychometrics from Princeton University. Professor Wainer is the author of fifteen previous books, most recently, Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures (2005).