why diagrams?
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n the book The Culture of Diagram, a diagram includes “reductive renderings, usually carried out as drawings, using few if any colours; they are generally supplemented with notations keyed to explanatory captions, with parts correlated by means of a geometric notational system." In effect, a diagram is any idea made visual. It is where the intellectual and the creative meet. We have so become accustomed to diagrams we hardly notice them, or appreciate them for what they do for us. They span from family trees, maps, pie charts to architectural floor plans, cave paintings and line graphs. The discipline of study that finds diagrams close to indispensable, is science. Diagrams serve as a tool to aid scientists in making enormously complex calculations and to simplify even more complex theories and mechanisms for others. But one of the greatest powers of a diagram is that it can pass on ideas.
Fig.(Left) Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man
Fig.(Bottom) Copernicus' heliocentric diagram
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