Coxcomb Plot
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Florence Nightingale
(1820-1910) |
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OK, so you already know that Florence Nightingale is known as the mother of
modern nursing, but did you know that she is also known for innovation in
the graphical portrayal of statistics? Shown here is a type of plot that she
called a "Coxcomb". This one brings home in an emphatic manner how many more
soldiers died off the battlefield than on it.
In a Coxcomb graph, frequency (here, number of deaths in a month) is
proportional to the area of the corresponding segment, and the angles of the
segments (one for each month) are all equal. Consequently, the frequency is
proportional to the square of the radius of the segment.