Born in New York City, Friendly obtained his BS in 1966 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his MS in 1969 from Princeton University. In 1971/2 he also obtained his PhD in psychology at Princeton under supervision of Harold Gulliksen and Peter Ornstein, with the thesis titled "Proximity Analysis and the Structure of Organization in Free Recall." Friendly's first research project in the field of psychometrics and cognitive psychology had started at the Educational Testing Service and Princeton University, and was made possible by a Psychometric Fellowship awarded by the Educational Testing Service. After graduation Friendly jointed the Department of Psychology at the York University in Ontario, Canada, where he continued his research. At the York University he was appointed Associate Professor and later on Professor of Psychology, and since 1985 also director of its Statistical Consulting Service. Friendly is Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics and an Editor of Statistical Science. In 2018 he became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Work
Friendly's research interests have developed over years. It started in the 1970s with the application of quantitative and computer methods to problems in cognitive psychology, including the cognitive aspects of extracting information from graphical displays. In the 1990s Friendly started focussing on the history of statistics and data visualization, and furthermore graphical methods for data and information visualization.
Publications
Friendly is the author of five books and numerous research papers. Books:
2006. Visual statistics : seeing data with dynamic interactive graphics. With Forrest W. Young and Pedro M. Valero-Mora. Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley-Interscience.
2016. Discrete Data Analysis with R: Visualization and Modeling Techniques for Categorical and Count Data. With David Meyer. Boca Raton, FL : Chapman & Hall/CRC Press..
2000. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 11:89-107. URL
2000. "The roots and branches of statistical graphics". With Dan Denis. In: Journal de la Société Française de Statistique, 141:51-60..
2007. "A brief history of data visualization". In: C. Chen, Wolfgang Härdle and Antony Unwin, eds., Handbook of Computational Statistics: Data Visualization, vol. III, chap. 1, pp. 1–34. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
2007. "". With Gilles Palsky. In: James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, pp. 205–251. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
2007. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 16, 421-444.
