Florence Nightingale - the famous statistician. What the...?

[Colin Graham]

Florence Nightingale is usually acclaimed, and renowned, for her nursing.  The "Lady with the lamp" is probably most remembered here in Britain for her ministrations to the troops during the Crimean War.  What many people forget, though, is that it was actually her data collection techniques and her invention of the polar-area diagram that lead to an improvement of sanitation in military and other hospitals.  She introduced the idea of evidence-based nursing, which now forms the basis of public healthcare throughout the world.  She promoted the idea of 'normalization' of data, through her visualizations, and pioneered many techniques for the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics.  And, in case you don't believe me, why does the statistics department of the UK's oldest university have a series of lectures named after her? http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/news_and_events/florence_nightingale_lecture

What is more remarkable is that women during her era rarely attended university, let alone study subjects such as mathematics.  When she died, she also left money in her will to establish a chair or professorship in applied statistics at Oxford University.  That was the first such chair in statistics anywhere in the UK, probably in the world!

As 13th August 2010 is the centenary of her death, this would be a timely and excellent subject for a general investigation: health, mathematics, statistics, feminism...  It is also a good time to re-assess her place in history as a woman of science, not just a nurse!  Check out Wikipedia as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale

BTW: I was a statistician before training as a maths teacher, and taught A-level statistics (17+). In my experience, one of the clearest practical descriptions of statistics in the workplace was/is T D V Swinscow's Statistics at Square One, which was originally written for nurses/doctors to explain the significance of various clinic tests etc.  Again, medicine leading the way!

It was originally published by the British Medical Journal and is available free online at http://www.bmj.com/statsbk/ Some of the medical terms may be a little tricky but the explanation of the concepts is very well exemplified and easy to conceptualize.  If you still don't understand basic statistical concepts after careful study of this, you probably never will! ;-)

[Ryan Goble]

Colin thanks for sharing this here!!!