Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Diagrams

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Florence Nightingale is known for her revolutionary impact on medicine. She transformed the hospital system and dramatically reduced the death rate from infection and disease. She reformed the nursing profession from a job fitted only for women of low repute to one that employed dedicated, educated women who wanted a career in nursing. She was known internationally as the woman with the lantern who visited sick and wounded soldiers at night to soothe and comfort them.

But what most people don’t know is that Nightingale’s influence went far beyond the medical profession. In an effort to make the results of her research on disease and death rates accessible to people, she began creating diagrams—visual tools to allow people to see beyond the simple numbers they were reading in order to understand the true nature of what those numbers conveyed. She invented an array of circular diagrams and bar charts, many of which are still in use today or which have evolved to become commonplace to our modern eyes. The “Lady with the Lamp” can also be credited as the “Lady with the Diagrams” for her work in pioneering a way for mathematicians and statisticians to present bare facts as intelligible truths.

There’s a “Doing the Math” section at the end of the book so that readers can try working out the math themselves!

Useful Links:

Listen to Robert Black talk about the Mathematical Lives series in the Breaking Math podcast.

Titles in Series:

Edward Lorenz and the Chaotic Butterflies
Benoit Mandelbrot: Reshaping the World
Ada Lovelace: Programming the Future
Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Diagrams
Pascal and Fermat: The Probability Pen Pals
David Blackwell and the Deadliest Duel

Mathematical Lives Set