About Me

Michael Friendly: Professor of Psychology at York University, developer of graphical methods for categorical and multivariate data, and historian of data visualization.

Photo of Michael Friendly

Michael Friendly


datavis.ca [Legacy web site]

dataVisFriendly [BlueSky]

friendly [GitHub]

vis.social/@datavisFriendly [Mastodon]

Warm, hand-drawn study with a reading chair and brass lamp beneath maps by Minard and Cheysson. A dual-monitor desk sits below a mosaic plot and an HE plot. Ceiling panels show van Langren’s lunar map, six Palmer penguins, and a scatterplot of their bill shape and body stoutness. Beside a flowering red hibiscus, painted vines frame the words Looking backward, Going forward and Truth & Beauty.

Looking backward, Going forward. An imagined study with historical maps on the walls, R on the desk, and Palmer penguins on the ceiling. Created with Codex in response to “Fill this room with what you know about me.”

Michael Friendly is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Professor of Psychology and coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service at York University. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics and has served as an editorial collaborator for many other journals. He received his Ph.D. in psychometrics and cognitive psychology from Princeton University.

His current research work includes the development of graphical methods for data visualization, where he is a principal innovator of novel methods for relatively “un-vizzed” problems, including visualizing categorical data (Visualizing Categorical Data, 2000; Discrete Data Analysis with R, with David Meyer, 2016) and multivariate data, the subject of his book Visualizing Multivariate Data and Models in R. Along with this, he is the author and maintainer of many R packages.

His passion for the deep roots of modern graphical methods led him to become a world-known amateur historian of data visualization. In the latter, he directs The Milestones Project, a comprehensive catalog and database of the principal developments in the histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics and data visualization. He is a founder of an international group, Les Chevaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique, devoted to this history and is author of multiple books and research papers on these topics. His most recent book in this area, with Howard Wainer, is A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard University Press, 2021).