Florence Nightingale: rebel with a cause

Florence Nightingale, the most famous female Victorian after Queen Victoria, is known for her commitment to nursing, especially in the Crimean War. She rebelled against convention to become a nurse at a time when nursing was seen as a lowly job, not suitable for ‘ladies’.

She broke convention in another less well-known, but much more significant way too. She was a mathematician – the first woman to be elected a member of the Royal Statistical Society. She also pioneered the use of pictures to present the statistical data that she collected about causes of war deaths and issues of sanitation and health.

Soldiers were dying in vast numbers in the field hospital she worked in, not directly from their original wounds but from the poor conditions. But how do you persuade people of something that (at least then) is so unintuitive? Even she originally got the cause of the deaths wrong, thinking they were due to poor nutrition, rather than the hospital conditions as her statistics later showed. Politicians, the people with power to take action, were incapable of understanding statistical reports full of numbers then (and probably now). She needed a way to present the information so that the facts would jump out to anyone. Only then could she turn her numbers into life-saving action. Her solution was to use pictures, often presenting her statistics as books of pie charts and circular histograms.

Whilst she didn’t invent them, Florence Nightingale certainly was responsible for demonstrating how effective they could be in promoting change, and so subsequently popularising their use. She undoubtedly saved more lives with her statistics than from her solitary rounds at night by lamplight.

Data visualisation is now an important area of computer science. As computers allow us to collect and store ever more data, it becomes harder and harder to make any sense of it all – to pick out the important nuggets of information that matter. Raw numbers are little use if you can’t turn them into knowledge, or better still wisdom. The right kind of picture for the right kind of data can do just that as Florence Nightingale showed.

'The Lady of the Lamp': more than a nurse, but also a remarkable statistician and pioneer of a field of computer science…a Lady who made a difference by rebelling with a cause.