The invisible math behind a chart's aesthetics

Dataviz is often celebrated as the marriage of art and science, but in our rush to make charts "beautiful", we can end up neglecting the "science" part—the underlying mathematical syntax. This session is an interactive, quiz-led deep dive into the often-overlooked mathematical traps that can turn a clean design into a lie. We will explore how technical choices can inadvertently distort the truth. A simple example: rounding the values 50.5, 51.4, and 51.1 to the nearest whole number produces three identical bars representing 51, masking the very variance the chart was meant to show. I will cover technicalities of scatter plots, histograms, line charts, bubble charts, and many more. And will also explain tips to avoid such issues. The session will take around 30 minutes, but is less than the "dialogue" format. It will be ideal for early-to-mid-career data visualizers, analysts, and designers who are comfortable with tools but want to sharpen their technical rigour.