{"id":190,"date":"2007-10-19T17:12:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-19T21:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=182"},"modified":"2007-10-19T17:12:40","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T21:12:40","slug":"visual-display-of-operations-research-dataalgorithmssolutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/10\/19\/visual-display-of-operations-research-dataalgorithmssolutions\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Display of Operations Research Data\/Algorithms\/Solutions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/tufte\/graphics\/poster_OrigMinard.gif\" align=\"left\" height=\"248\" width=\"352\" \/>When I was a doctoral student (20 years ago!), my adviser <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.isye.gatech.edu\/~jjb\/\">John Bartholdi<\/a> introduced me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/tufte\/\">Edward Tufte&#8217;s<\/a> <em>Visual Display of Quantitative Information<\/em>, perhaps hoping that my dissertation would be a model of appealing, provocative display.  I am afraid I disappointed him:  just like every other doctoral student, my dissertation contained great vomits of tables containing every piece of data I had generated over the previous years.  I still find the topic fascinating, and I still find <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/tufte\/posters\">Minard&#8217;s graph of the fortunes of Napoleon&#8217;s army in the Russian campaign of 1812<\/a> an inspiring sight.<\/p>\n<p>Most operations research has pretty terrible presentation.  Partially this is because of the high-dimensions in which we work.  Only rarely can we work in 2 or 3 dimensions and present comprehensible results.  Once in a whle I see something inspiring.  One recent work I saw was the <a href=\"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=158\">EURO Gold Medal presentation of Aharon Ben-Tal<\/a>.  Part of the presentation involved showing how nonlinear optimization algorithms affected the design of a bridge span.  The display of the span made things perfectly clear.   And the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tsp.gatech.edu\/methods\/opt\/opt.htm\">visual display of moats for the traveling salesman problem<\/a> is a very effective way of getting across the definition and validity of the lower bounds.<\/p>\n<p>Taking some sites from outside of our field for inspiration, let me offer <a href=\"http:\/\/junkcharts.typepad.com\/\">JunkCharts<\/a> (thanks to Kaiser for providing a comment which led me to the site) and <a href=\"http:\/\/strangemaps.wordpress.com\/\">Strange Maps<\/a>.  JunkCharts looks at a variety of displays of numbers, offering critiques about misrepresentations and other biases.    Strange Maps matches with my own interest in antique maps, but concentrates on unusual maps, often representing some other data in its geographic layout.<\/p>\n<p>We could use more such creativity in operations research:  have you seen something particularly effective?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was a doctoral student (20 years ago!), my adviser John Bartholdi introduced me to Edward Tufte&#8217;s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, perhaps hoping that my dissertation would be a model of appealing, provocative display. I am afraid I disappointed him: just like every other doctoral student, my dissertation contained great vomits of tables &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/10\/19\/visual-display-of-operations-research-dataalgorithmssolutions\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Visual Display of Operations Research Data\/Algorithms\/Solutions&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}