W.E.B. Du Bois

1868–1963 · American sociologist, historian and civil rights leader

W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate, a founder of the NAACP, and — the detail that makes this misattribution so seductive — a pioneering quantitative sociologist. The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was built on door-to-door survey work, and his hand-drawn data charts for the 1900 Paris Exposition are now famous as early information design. A line about numbers becoming meanings fits him beautifully. It is still not his: it belongs to a man who ran a conglomerate.

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1 quote we’ve traced

“When you have mastered numbers, you will no longer be reading numbers”

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