ARE UNDERVALUED in science. They are not trusted. That is partly the 200-year-old legacy of the French mathematicians Lagrange and Laplace, who scrupulously labored to reduce all logical thought to precise formulae and carefully chosen words; sloppy diagrams were suspect. Their motivation was, I believe, partly technological: At that time drawings were imprecise and costly, a product of human hands. But in our lifetime the computer has changed all that. A modern diagram or chart can be as precise as desired, and is no more costly than the computer that draws it.
