WS More or Less: Hans Rosling - the extraordinary life of a statistical guru

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

A huge hole was left in the world this week with the death of the Swedish statistician Han Rosling. He was a master communicator whose captivating presentations on global development were watched by millions. He had the ear of those with power and influence. His friend Bill Gates said Hans ‘brought data to life and helped the world see the human progress it often overlooked’. In a world that often looks at the bad news coming out of the developing world, Rosling was determined to spread the good news, extended life expectancy, falling rates of disease and infant mortality. He was fighting what he called the ‘post-fact era‘ of global health. He was passionate about global development and before he became famous he lived and worked in Mozambique, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo using data and his skills as a doctor to save lives. Despite ill health he also travelled to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to help gather and consolidate data to help fight the outbreak. On a personal level he was warm, funny and kind and will be greatly missed by a huge number of people.

Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Wesley Stephenson

(Image: Hans Rosling, speaks at a conference in 2012. Credit: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for ReSource 2012)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to a special edition of more or less on the BBC World Service.
0:05.1	I'm Tim Harford and in this programme we'll be remembering Hans Rosling,
0:09.5	the man who brought statistics to life and showed us why facts mattered.
0:14.0	The world we live in is a wash with data that comes pouring in from everywhere around us. On its own, this data is just noise and confusion. To make sense of data, to find the meaning in it, we need a powerful branch of science statistics
0:40.0	Hans died this week he had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. He was just 68 and as he might have told us himself that is well below the life expectancy for a man in Sweden. Hans was passionate about battling ignorance. He wanted to
0:55.3	communicate the facts about the world, particularly the long-term good news
0:59.6	trends that are often unreported, better health, longer lives, fewer infant deaths.
1:06.5	In 2005 Hans and two of his children set up a foundation called Gapminder and developed path-breaking software tools to display data in a way that really told a story.
1:17.0	Instead of lines and columns, bright bubbles would dance on the screen.
1:21.0	He put the software in the spotlight at the Ted Conference in
1:25.4	Monterrey, California in 2006. Ted is famous for producing videos of inspiring talks. few were more striking than those of Hans.
1:36.0	His TED Talk was to make him famous.
1:38.8	Here's the boss of Ted, Chris Anderson.
1:41.4	We started hearing these rumors of this extraordinary Swedish statistician who had a way of making
1:48.8	public health statistics actually seemed not boring. So that sounded like exactly the kind of person we
1:54.5	wanted to find and my colleague June Cohen spent a lot of time trying hard to
2:00.3	persuade him to come to Ted. He eventually agreed, didn't really know what Ted was.
2:05.1	And then he came and gave this Tour de Force presentation, which included the segment of his
2:10.9	trademark animated graphics, which in about 35 seconds flat
2:15.7	changed the worldview of everyone watching. Every bubble here is a country this is
2:22.3	China and this is India, the size of the bubble is the population,
2:26.8	and on this axis here I put fertility rate. Here I put life expectancy at birth,
	...

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