I had heard the same thing about Florence Nightingale, but it seems that this is a confusion of different graphs.  
 
Nightingale developed a graph based on a circle, but all the angles were equal and the different values were encoded by using different radii of the slices (and she did the right thing by having the radius proportional to the square root of the value).  She never named this plot, but I have seen coxcomb (Nightingale refered to the document in which this graph first appeared as the coxcomb) or rotogram used as names.  At first glance this may be confused for a pie chart, hence the credit, but in truth I think Nightingale is innocent of the crime of creating the first pie chart.

________________________________

From: r-help-bounces@r-project.org on behalf of Rolf Turner
Sent: Mon 1/28/2008 12:10 PM
To: r-help
Subject: Re: [R] [OT] vernacular names for circular diagrams




On 28/01/2008, at 12:07 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Jean lobry wrote:
>>>

        <snip>

>>>  about an hour North of Paris. Her father inquired -
>>>  coincidentally during the cheese course - what work I was
>>>  doing in Paris; I replied that I was researching the
>>>  activities of a Scot, William Playfair, during the
>>>  revolutionary period. I told him that Playfair had invented
>>>  several statistical graphs, including the pie chart

        <snip>


I have been for many years under the impression that the pie chart
was invented by Florence Nightingale.  Am I misinformed?

                cheers,

                        Rolf Turner

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