Hello and welcome to More or Less. I'm Tim Haferd and we're your weekly guide to the

numbers all around us in life and in the news. Although this week we'll be looking at

some 19th century numbers and the women who wielded them to change the world. Florence Nightingale

was a true celebrity in Victorian Britain and became one of the closest things the UK had to

a patron saint. Her image was on the English banknote in the 1970s, 80s and 90s at the time

the only non-royal woman ever to have adorned the currency. This fame recognised her work as a

nurse in the Crimean War of the mid-1850s in which the Russian Empire fought and lost a bitter battle

with the other great European powers, including Britain. Wounded British soldiers were transported

from the front to hospitals in Istanbul, where despite the efforts of Nightingale's team of

nurses they perished in great numbers. This catastrophe notwithstanding Florence Nightingale was

immortalised as the Lady with the Lamp, walking the wards and tending the needs of the wounded.

But in nerd circles, which are the circles I move in and I hope the same is true for you,

dear listener. Florence Nightingale is more famous as a pioneer of statistics and statistical

graphics. I hope that I now have your attention. Florence was born 199 years ago this month in Florence,

Italy. I wonder where her parents got the idea for her name. And her statistical facility was

soon apparent. She was interested in numbers at a very young age. That's Dr. Eileen Magnello,

Research Associates at University College London and Historian of Statistics. As an eight-year-old

girl she was counting animals in the zoo. She also collected data and put an tabular format when

she was nine years old. Was it about her garden I seem to remember? She was playing with

her cousins and her sisters and they had all these twigs and all these little things around them

and she put something that was fruits and one picture and then vegetables and another and put

small ones and large ones and reorganised and categorised all this data as a nine-year-old child.

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