William Playfair was a Scottish engineer and economist, who invented the pie and bar charts as well as the line graph, which have all played an indubitably ubiquitous role in modern statistics. I hadn't actually come across Playfair, before I browsed Colin Stuart's Maths 100 Numbers book. The book put William Playfair as follows: "It's fair to say the inventor of the ubiquitous line graph, bar chart and pie chart is not a household name." What is it that deterred him from being a household name, given the contributions he made to statistics? Even in the scientific community, since statistics plays such a fundamental role in modelling numerous phenomena?
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Bar and pie charts do not really belong to mathematics: these are just visualization tools. – Alexandre Eremenko Jun 06 '20 at 11:02
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3Hi. Unfortunately, questions of the form "Why doesn't X get much attention" are unanswerable because they're opinion-based. – Spencer Jun 06 '20 at 13:44