Plot twist Charts as the elegant messengers of math

They're really just combinations of lines, curves and colours; but the stories they tell are infinite. For thousands of years - since the caves at Lascaux, France - charts have been letting us say, without words: This is where we are right now. Today, they tell stories of shifting markets, chart the progress of new experiments, track the growing inequality in our societies. They dig deep, to help us see new layers of a problem, and start to solve it. Our favourite at Wknd is that chart of everything, that veritable prophecy of who you will be: the simple bell curve. What's yours?

- Kashyap Kompella

Charts have a starring role in humanity's grand timeline.

The ancients tracked the dots in the night sky and plotted celestial patterns, creating their versions of cosmic PowerPoint slides, with clear calls to action for life on earth.

Through the millennia, our quest to understand the world has continued. The methods and metrics we use are now more specialised, more sophisticated. They provide new layers of insight and nuance.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, for instance, seismic charts revealed a whole new way in which we had been impacting our planet.

Put simply: vibrations in the earth had dropped by half. Between March and May 2020, with movement, transport and industrial operations paused, the earth itself was about 50% stiller.

In this way, quantum leaps in our techniques and technologies throw new light on our world. If our ancestors looked to the sky for clues, we have taken to the skies to learn more: Through satellite images, voyagers, the Mars landing missions, and rovers on the moon.