How Hard Can It Be to Draw a Pie Chart

Pie charts are a familiar way to display how a total is composed of or divided into parts. For example, FIGURE 1 displays the distribution of science and engineering doctorates awarded in 1984. (The source of this data is Table 1015 in Reference 7.) There is a lively debate about the merits of pie charts as a means to display data [1, 2, 6]. We are not concerned here with the accuracy of people's perceptions of pie charts, however, but rather with the difficulty of laying out a pie chart.