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A product of the Scottish Enlightenment, William Playfair (1759–1823) worked as a statistician, economist, engineer, banker, land speculator, scam artist, and political propagandist. It has been claimed – erroneously – that Playfair was a spy for the British government and ran a forging operation to print the paper money of the French Revolution. The Flawed Genius of William Playfair offers a complete account of Playfair’s life, richly contextualized in the economic, political, and cultural history of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The book explores the many peaks and troughs of Playfair’s career, ranging from moderate prosperity to bankruptcy and imprisonment. Through ...
A scientific revolution began at the end of the eighteenth century with the invention and popularization of the graphic display of data by the remarkable Scot, William Playfair. His marvellous Atlas showed how much could be learned if one plotted data atheoretically and looked for suggestive patterns. Those patterns provide evidence, albeit circumstantial, on which to build new science. Playfair's work has much to teach us, but finding a copy has been almost impossible. Until now. This full colour reproduction of two of his classic works, with new explanatory material, makes Playfair's wisdom widely available for the first time in two centuries.
A picture-book biography of Scotland-born William Playfair (1759-1823) the inventor of the line graph, bar graph and pie chart.
William Playfair is best known as an ingenious Scot of questionable repute who happened to invent "statistical graphics"--the line, bar, and pie charts we use today. Some are also aware he developed theories explaining international trade and investment, made contributions to concepts like price indexes and measures of national power, and pioneered strategic analysis. Yet even those familiar with his work will be surprised to learn that Playfair was, in fact, a secret agent, carrying out espionage and subversion against France on behalf of Great Britain. Many of his contributions to economics and statistics were a direct result of his most audacious operation, the first full-scale campaign t...
Good graphs make complex problems clear. From the weather forecast to the Dow Jones average, graphs are so ubiquitous today that it is hard to imagine a world without them. Yet they are a modern invention. This book is the first to comprehensively plot humankind's fascinating efforts to visualize data, from a key seventeenth-century precursor--England's plague-driven initiative to register vital statistics--right up to the latest advances. In a highly readable, richly illustrated story of invention and inventor that mixes science and politics, intrigue and scandal, revolution and shopping, Howard Wainer validates Thoreau's observation that circumstantial evidence can be quite convincing, as ...