Howard G. Funkhouser

Howard Gray Funkhouser (April 14, 1898 – Dec. 1984) was an American mathematician, historian and associate professor of mathematics at the Washington and Lee University, and later at the Phillips Exeter Academy, particularly known for his early work on the history of graphical methods.

Funkhouser quoted the English economist and logician W. Stanley Jevons, who had stated in 1879: Funkhouser and Walker argued, that Playfair should be recognized as the “man who invented outright the graphic method of representing statistical data.”[6][7] His Commercial and Political Atlas, published in of 1786 was historically the first book that offered a series of statistical charts.

[8] These charts pictured the import and exports of two dozen countries during the whole of the eighteenth century, and some other economical data, such as the progress of the commerce, revenues, expenditure, and debts of England over the same period.

For this purpose the zone of the zodiac was represented on a plane with a horizontal line divided into thirty parts as the time or longitudinal axis.

"[11] Edward Tufte (1983) recalled, that Funkhouser made a critical note about this early time-series chart, that "the astronomical content is confused and there are difficulties in reconciling the graph and its accompanying text with the actual movements of the planets.