Florence Nightingale invented the pie chart to be able to convey medical data visually in a time before other visual devices were invented. They still serve a role, but an argument against them today is that representing two dimensional data in three dimensions can be misleading (such as w/surface area).
Sorry, but did you mean one-dimensional data represented in two dimensions, as in scalars represented through areas?
Pie charts can be three-dimensional, but thanks for clearing up what I muddied.