Editing Scatter plot (section)

== History ==
{{See also|Data and information visualization#History}}
According to Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis, the defining characteristic distinguishing scatter plots from line charts is the representation of specific observations of bivariate data where one variable is plotted on the horizontal axis and the other on the vertical axis. The two variables are often abstracted from a physical representation like the spread of bullets on a target or a geographic or celestial projection.<ref name=":0">{{cite journal|last1=Friendly|first1=Michael|last2=Denis|first2=Dan|title=The early origins and development of the scatterplot|journal=Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences|date=2005|volume=41|issue=2|pages=103–130|doi=10.1002/jhbs.20078|pmid=15812820}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web| title=The early origins and development of the scatterplot | url=https://www.datavis.ca/papers/friendly-scat.pdf | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100613104833/http://www.datavis.ca:80/papers/friendly-scat.pdf | archive-date=2010-06-13}}</ref>

While Edmund Halley created a bivariate plot of temperature and pressure in 1686, he omitted the specific data points used to demonstrate the relationship. Friendly and Denis claim his visualization was different from an actual scatter plot. Friendly and Denis attribute the first scatter plot to [[John Herschel]]. In 1833, Herschel plotted the angle between the central star in the constellation Virgo and [[Gamma Virginis]] over time to find how the angle changes over time, not through calculation but with freehand drawing and human judgment.<ref name=":0" />

[[Sir Francis Galton]] extended and popularized the scatter plot and many other statistical tools to pursue a scientific basis for eugenics.<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal |last=Louçã |first=Francisco |date=2009 |title=Emancipation Through Interaction — How Eugenics and Statistics Converged and Diverged |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/25650625 |journal=Journal of the History of Biology |volume=42 |issue=4 |pages=649–684 |doi=10.1007/s10739-008-9167-7 |jstor=25650625 |pmid=20481126 |issn=0022-5010|url-access=subscription }}</ref> When, in 1886, Galton published a scatter plot and correlation ellipse of the height of parents and children, he extended Herschel's mere plotting of data points by binning and averaging adjacent cells to create a smoother visualization.<ref name=":0" /> Karl Pearson, R. A. Fischer, and other statisticians and eugenicists built on Galton's work and formalized correlations and significance testing.<ref name=":1" />