Stem-and-leaf display

They evolved from Arthur Bowley's work in the early 1900s, and are useful tools in exploratory data analysis.

Stemplots became more commonly used in the 1980s after the publication of John Tukey's book on exploratory data analysis in 1977.

[1] The popularity during those years is attributable to their use of monospaced (typewriter) typestyles that allowed computer technology of the time to easily produce the graphics.

[4] Unlike histograms, stem-and-leaf displays retain the original data to at least two significant digits, and put the data in order, thereby easing the move to order-based inference and non-parametric statistics.

The stem-and-leaf display is drawn with two columns separated by a vertical line.

This allows the stem and leaf plot to retain its shape, even for more complicated data sets.

A stem-and-leaf plot of prime numbers under 100 shows that the most frequent tens digits are 0 and 1 while the least is 9