“My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa
constrictor digesting an elephant.”
The Little Prince, Chapter 1 - Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
Drawing Number One
Inspired by the Little Prince and in
honor of Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry 110th birthday, we are dedicating this blog post to his
timeless masterpiece The Little
Prince.
The Little Prince starts with
a picture titled “Drawing Number One”, which grown-ups typically interpret as a hat, but only
the acute eye of a child can reveal is actually a snake digesting an elephant. Well,
unfortunately we were those kids who just saw it as a sum of two Gaussians.
As the team responsible for Google’s Chart
Tools, we continuously think about how to enrich your options for visual
storytelling on the web. To be able to generate figures like the one above, we thought it will
be cool to enhance the Image Chart API with the capability to draw
TeX formulas
and plot mathematical
functions. Once we added these capabilities, we
thought it would be even more useful to combine the two into one chart, and therefore
developed a
simple way to place one chart within another chart. This chart embedding
is not just limited to formulas and equations; it can be applied to any combination of chart
types.
As you can see,
we are working hard to support all of your visualization needs, but please always keep in mind
the saying of the little prince’s fox:
Before saying goodbye, we invite you to
open the figures above in a new tab. This way you can observe how they are rendered using URL
based requests to our Image Chart server.
"And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a
matter of so much
importance!"
