Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Abstract
The history of statistics has become interesting in recent decades to a remarkably diverse group of scholars, and for an equally wide-ranging unwieldy set of reasons, Among them: (1) The incorporation of chance, and of statistical reasoning, into the sciences has involved some fundamental intellectual changes, perhaps even a kind of scientific revolution. (2) As a social technology, statistics is a form of information that is also an important medium of power. (3) Statistics joins the human sciences to the physical and natural ones. More than that, it has come to involve in a particularly striking way an ideal and an ethic of objectivity, meaning, among other things, control of the subjective. (4) Statistics has become an indispensable language of public discussion, with immense credibility even if it is also sometimes condemned. The history of statistical graphics and the rise of statistical thinking are intertwined with each other throughout the 19th century. Over this time, social, behavioral, medical, and economic statistics began to be gathered in large and periodic series, and the usefulness of these bodies of data for planning, for governmental response, and as a subject worth of study in tis own right, began to be recognized, Graphical methods were in widespread use in the second half of 19th century. The brith of statistical thinking was also accompanied by a rise in visual thinking: a desire to make these numbers - their trends, tendencies, and distributions - more easily communicated or accessible to visual inspection. This paper brings together topics representing notable landmarks in historical developments in statistical graphics. William playfair invented the pie chart in 1801. In the following two centuries, this serviceable and Likeable little graph has found many uses and users. Ever since John Tukey's graphical representation has drawn interest as a form of visulaization and a means of communication, and these roles are important enough, But its significance extends still further.
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