Marie Neurath

Isotype, to illustrate road traffic, in a book by Otto Neurath, of 1925.

Marie Neurath (27th May 1898 - 10. October 1986, aged 87) was a German Illustrator. Before marrying, she was called Marie Reidemeister. Neurath studied mathemathics and physics, in Göttingen. She also went to an art shool. She met Otto Neurath, and became his assistant in Vienna, before marrying him. The Dollfuss regime closed the instutue, and the couple fled to the Netherlands, and then to England.

Today, Neurath is mostly credited for starting Isotype. Isotype is a standarized system of illustrations, called pictograms. There are rules, how to combine these pictugrams, called a grammar. Neurath founded the Isotype institute with her husband in 1942. She continued it, until the 1970s, after her husband died in 1945. She also wrote some children's books, where she used illustrations to educate the childrten.

Isotype was originally developed to illustrate statistics, and to make them easier to understand.