Pie Charts

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Maths, Math Education

Ed Hessler

"I’ve written at length in the past about the failures of pie charts and circular dashboard gauges, so I’ll keep my comments brief about them here. Although the evidence of a pie chart’s dysfunction is hard to ignore when you actually take a moment to inspect it, nothing that I teach is met with such fierce opposition as my low opinion of them." - Stephen Few

The epigraph is from an article published by Stephen Few, Perceptual Edge: the Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter (March/April/May 2010). It serves as a good enough introduction to that essay on circular graphs...pie charts. For the circular displays he includes alternative displays of the same data and provides rich discussions. I found it an interesting read.