Year: 2023
Type: paratext
Abstract: Today, William Playfair (1759-1823) is known as the father of statistical graphics.That is a twentieth-century attribution from statisticians and psychologists to someone who died nearly two centuries ago.In London, where Playfair lived and worked for many years, the Royal Statistical Society came into being only a little more than a decade after Playfair's death.Statistics as a discipline was barely a toddler when Playfair was active.What motivated Playfair's graphical work was economic data, and what piqued his interest in economics was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.It is not surprising then that the earliest biographies of Playfair, and assessments of his work, appear in the economics literature (Edgeworth 1899; Funkhouser and Walker 1935).The latter article shows a budding interest by the statistical community.It was written not by an economist, but by two historians of mathematics.One of them, H. Gray Funkhouser, soon followed the 1935 article with a major study on the use of graphical techniques up to the 1930s (Funkhouser 1937).Playfair is now nearly forgotten among the economists, but significant interest in his life and graphical work has picked up and accelerated in the statistical literature over the last thirty years or so.Throughout this book I will try to put Playfair into his historical context.He was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment and it shows in much of his writing.He worked during a period of major political and economic upheaval.He began his career as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold and as the American Revolution was concluding.He went to France as the French Revolution was unfolding.As a writer on economic and political issues, he was most active in England during the Napoleonic Wars.I have tried to weave all this into the narrative of his life.Playfair's life was more than his work in statistics and economics.
Author: David R. Bellhouse
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4388769890