Beautiful Evidence (repost)

"Science and art," according to Tufte, "have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information." This book is about how that seeing turns into showing.

Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University and author of three previous widely praised books on visual evidence, displays outstanding examples of the genre. One of the most arresting is Galileo's series of hand-drawn images of sunspots. A colleague of Galileo, the author tells us, said that the astronomer's drawings "delight both by the wonder of the spectacle and the accuracy of expression." That, Tufte says, is beautiful evidence.

Editors of Scientific American
Review
"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." – Business Week, Best Innovation and Design Books for 2006