Nathan Chun-Yin Yau is an American statistician and

data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...

expert.

Early life

Nathan Chun-Yin Yau grew up in

Fresno, California Fresno (; ) is a city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, United States. It is the county seat of Fresno County, California, Fresno County and the largest city in the greater Central Valley (California), Central Valley region. It covers a ...

. He received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

in electrical engineering and computer science from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He graduated in 2007 with a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

and in 2013 with a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in statistics from the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

. His dissertation was titled "An Online Tool for Personal Data Collection and Exploration" and focused on self-surveillance techniques. Yau's earlier self-surveillance work on the "Personal Environmental Impact Report" was featured in Yau's chapter of the book ''Beautiful Data'', published in 2009.

Career

Yau is known for his blog ''FlowingData'' in which he publishes writing and tutorials on

information design Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters an efficient and effective understanding of the information. The term has come to be used for a specific area of graphic design related to displaying information ...

and

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sc ...

, as well as visualizations and

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

-related projects created by other professionals. He is the author of books "''Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics''" (2011) and "''Data Points: Visualization That Means Something''" (2013). Since 2014, Yau has worked at the U.S. Census as a research mathematical statistician.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yau, Nathan Living people American digital artists Information graphic designers American data scientists People from Fresno, California UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni Year of birth missing (living people) United States Census Bureau people