Bob Easton Blog

As Edward Tufte walked around the seminar room holding up an original printing of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he repeatedly said, “Sign Your Work!”  He showed us Newton’s handwritten signature on the flyleaf of that book.  Then, he turned to the back flyleaf and showed the signature of the man who set the type and printed the books.

That was from one of Tufte’s seminars that I attended several decades ago.  At the root, Tufte is a statistician, data/information analyst, and artist.  His gift to our world is how to visually organize data in useful, instantly understood ways. Perhaps he was the father of what we now call “info graphics.” 

Today, if you are interested, that seminar is still relevant and is an online course.

At the time I attended his seminar, he was publishing 3 books, the bottom 3 on this stack.  He was such a stickler for detail that he created his own publishing company, Graphics Press, and did all of the finicky typesetting and illustration placement for these books.  

Those books were invaluable to me as I progressed through 40 years of work at IBM, ending up in what was then their prestigious Research Division.  My son. also a data driven geek in the earliest stages of the AI/SI industry now owns those books and I sometimes remind him “Sign Your Work.” Be proud of what you do and let others know who you are.