This week I finally attended Edward Tufte’s one-day visualization course. It was a great day, filled with inspiration. I had seen Tufte’s books before and read a lot about his theories and principles. I have been very inspired by a lot of them and I am trying to make use of them in my own book on “Applied Security Visualization“. Tufte has a certain way of pondering a topic that makes you think hard – even about the most controversial things; such as: “Forget PowerPoint”. He has some good arguments and maybe I will try some of his principles in my next presentation.

I was definitely impressed with the two books he brought along to the course. He showed one of the first prints of Galileo’s book. An absolutely beautiful piece of work! Notice how E.T. holds the book in his bare hands (picture below), while his assistant is wearing gloves.

The other book he brought along was one of the first prints of Euclid’s book where all the Euclidean geometry is explained. Note the three-dimensional pyramids in the book. Amazing for a book that was printed hundreds of years ago!