News Reporter
Last Thursday Dr. Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus of the Yale University Mathematics Department, addressed the school as the fifth Charles Krause ’51 Fellow in Rhetoric. Tufte, a graduate of Stanford and Yale, is widely considered the premier authority on graphical information design, and has been called, by the New York Times, the “Leonardo da Vinci of Data” and, by BusinessWeek, the “Gallileo of Graphics.”
Tufte, who lives in Cheshire, attended dinner at the school with a group of specially selected students prior to the talk, and was later available for individual questions in the Sally Hart Lodge following the presentation in the PMAC Main Theater. His host for the evening was the Choate Math Department.
“We wanted somebody who was going to appeal to the broad range of students at Choate, and we also wanted someone who was an outstanding public speaker,” said Math Department Head Elisa Currie.
The Krause Lecture Series was endowed in 2001 to “bring to campus a figure who has made a distinguished contribution in his or her field and whose personal example may inspire our students.” The selection of the speaker rotates among the academic departments. Past speakers have included Princeton Classicist Robert Fagles, Harvard professor Samantha Powers, and forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee.
Tufte began his exploration into graphical representations of data while teaching statistics at Princeton University in the mid-1970s. He completed his defining first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, in 1982 after relocating to Yale, and has since published six additional titles, including his latest, Beautiful Evidence. Because no publishing company agreed to meet the exacting printing specifications Tufte demanded for his first book, including numerous, colorful, high-resolution images, he has self-published all his titles.
Tufte retired from Yale in 1999, preferring the freedom of running his own operation to the “bureaucratic bloat” of the university. He now focuses on writing, sculpting, and presenting a one-day seminar to business audiences called “Presenting Data and Information,” which commands an admission fee of $380 per attendee.
On Thursday night Tufte gave an overview of his beliefs on how information can most effectively presented, focusing on two difficulties: presenting “multi-dimensional data” on two-dimensional media, such as paper or computer screens; and efficiency, fitting more data per area and more data per time while maintaining accessibility.
“The driving principles of information design,” said Tufte, “are derived from the cognitive needs they need to suit.”
These principles include showing causality, making “smart comparisons,” integrating text and images, and thoroughly documenting sources. He illustrated these through a series of examples, from illustrations of Saturn’s rings in Galileo’s The Starry Messenger from 1610 to visual representation of Major League Baseball records through “sparklines:” text-sized graphs that can easy show hundreds of data points.
Finally, in response to a question, Tufte discussed his well-documented dislike of Microsoft’s PowerPoint application for data presentation. Calling the program a “low-resolution display device,” Tufte cited evidence that PowerPoint presentations deeply based in what he referred to a as marketing “pitch culture” were on some level responsible for the Columbia space shuttle disaster. According to Tufte, with the advent of this “pitch culture” Microsoft has dramatically perverted the way data is perceived.
“Microsoft has eliminated the fundamental mechanism of though—the sentence,” said Tufte, “and replaced it with the bullet point.”
Math Lecture
Tufte wasn’t the only math lecturer on campus last week. On Monday night, the department hosted James Surowiecki ’84, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. In the lecture, he focused on the thesis of his book, and explored the phenomenon that decentralized groups including both experts and laypeople often make better decisions and predictions than the experts alone.
The presentation was part of the Math Lecture series, orchestrated by teacher Fred Djang, which has brought three to four mathematic-related speakers per year to campus for nearly two decades.
