So clearly the Periodic Table of Elements is not only one of the most elegant displays of quantitiative information, it's also one of the most efficient and useful. Also, few people appreciate the fact that Mendelev (the guy who intented it) was pretty much a genius in that he figured out a way to catalog the elements so that they would line up perfectly and display a lot of cool patterns and groups. For example, the table works both horizontally and vertically with single nuclear protons being added as numbers increase rom left to right. But! Each column of elements also indicates the number of valence electrons, which determines what family each element is in! None of this would make any sense at all if we put Helium (He) in the seemingly obvious position right next to Hydrogen (H) but it does because Helium stays on the total other side of the chart. Cool, right?
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