The Man

Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginai and Edward E. Tufte. A professor emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design, and political economy at Yale University. Tufte has been described by The New York Times as the "Leonardo da Vinci" of Data. He is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is afellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowshis from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences

Tufte lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. He periodially travels around the United States to offer one-day workshops on data presentation and information graphics.

The Artist

Nine years ago Tufte set aside painting and started sculpting. Large abstract pieces now rise fromt he landscape in Cheshire and Hogpen Hill. Spring Arcs, a series of solid stainless steel arcs that seem to squash and stretch depending on your vantage point, span 12 by 67 feet. The Millstone pieces are curved rust-colored giants, 11,000 pounds of scrap from the nuclear power plant from which they tak their name. Dear Leader, installed in teh winter but deemed finished by only in May when grass was planted around it, is two giant porcelain and steel cylindrical shapes, Tufte's vision of missiles fired from North Korea that plonk down in a Connecticut field.

The Writer

"Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book in brilliant. The Galileo of graphics has done it again. It's not often an iconoclast comes along, trashes the old ways, and replaces them with an irresistible new interpretation. By teasing out the sublime from the seemingly mundane world of charts, graphs, and tables, Tufte has proven to a generation of graphic designers that great thinking begets great presentation. In Beautiful Evidence, his fourth work on analytical design, Tufte digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty -- all the way from Galileo to Google."