A hillbilly family was justifiably proud that one son had actually graduated from high school and gone to college. When he got his diploma and came home, the family had a huge reception for the boy.
The father quieted the congregation and said, "Mah boy are goin' to dee-mon-strate the book larnin' he got at the University of Chicago. Come up, boy, and say something smart."
The embarrassed young man got to his feet and said, "Pi r square."
His father walloped him on the side of the head, knocking him to the floor.
"You IDJIT!" he yelled. Pie are round. Corn bread are square."
Much to my surprise, because in all my reading I'd never read this, it was Florence Nightingale. Shu is really in to the English show, QI, which is where he heard it.
The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair's Statistical Breviary of 1801, in which two such graphs are used. This invention was not widely used at first; the French engineer Charles Joseph Minard was one of the first to use it in 1858, in particular in maps where he needed to add information in a third dimension. It has been said that Florence Nightingale invented it, though in fact she just popularised it and she was later assumed to have created it due to the obscurity of Playfair's creation.
In 1786 and 1801, Playfair invented three fundamental forms of statistical graph—the time-series line graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart—and he did so without significant precursors. Hence he is the creator of all the basic styles of graph with the exception of the scatterplot, which did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century.
The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published from 1885. The updated Dictionary of National Biography (0DNB) was published on 23 September 2004 in 60 volumes and online.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: tinman,
