William Playfair
William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823), a Scottish engineer and
political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of
graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of
diagrams: in 1786 the
line,
area and
bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the
pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As a secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency.
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