Charles Joseph Minard

Charles Joseph Minard (; ; 27 March 1781 – 24 October 1870) was a French civil engineer recognized for his significant contribution in the field of information graphics in civil engineering and statistics. Minard was, among other things, noted for his representation of numerical data on geographic maps, especially his flow maps.

Early life Minard was born in Dijon in the Saint Michel parish. He was the son of Pierre Étienne Minard and Bénigne Boiteux. His father was a clerk of the court and an officer of the secondary school. Minard was baptized at Saint Michel on the day of his birth. He was an intelligent child and his father encouraged him to study at an early age. At age four he learned to read and write, and when he was six his father enrolled him in an elementary course in anatomy. He completed his fourth year of study at the secondary school at Dijon early, and then applied himself to studying Latin, literature, and physical and math sciences.

Work Civil engineering In September 1810 he was sent by the government to Antwerp and then almost immediately to the port of Flushing in Zeeland. There, he solved a critical problem with a cofferdam that was leaking water faster than it could be removed. He solved the problem by using pumps driven by a steam engine, only the third time this solution had been applied to a project.

Early works

Minard's earliest known diagram is from 1825, This type of band graph for illustration of flows was later called a Sankey diagram, although Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey used this visualisation 30 years later and only for thematic energy flow. Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates.

The original description in French accompanying the map translated to English:

A modern redrawing of the map, translated into English:

Recognition Eugène Rouher painted by Alexandre Cabanel, ca. 1861. A map by Charles Joseph Minard is draped over the chair in the background. Minard's information graphics, many of which illustrated the flows of goods and people in transportation networks, were appreciated by public works officials during his lifetime. Eugène Rouher, the secretary of agriculture, commerce, and public works in the government of Napoleon III, subscribed to Minard's prints, allowing him to publish ten thousand copies of maps on various subjects. Rouher also presented Minard's maps to Napoleon III and included one of them in the background of his portrait, exhibited at the 1861 Paris Salon. Information designer Edward Tufte says it "may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn" and uses it as a prime example in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Howard Wainer identified Minard's map as a "gem" of information graphics, nominating it as the "World's Champion Graph". The Economist described it as one of "three of history's best" charts.