Displaying information: from woolly mammoths to the Great Migration

Successfully negotiating the modern world often requires full and facile comprehension of quantitative phenomena. Experience gathered over more than three centuries has taught us this is best done by transforming the evidence into various kinds of pictures, so that we can enlist the remarkable power of the human visual system to rapidly decode and store complex information. This article traces the evolution of data visualization and in the process reveals many mysteries and their solutions.