The activity below is the second of four produced for the University of Nottingham's Florence Nightingale Comes Home project. With another mouthful of a title, Diagram Representing the Mortality in the Hospitals at Scutari and Kulali, from Oct 1st 1854 to Sept 20th 1855 looks at death rates in Crimean military hospitals, comparing them to annual average death rates in London military hospitals for the same period.
This is a Polar Area Chart, which isn't something that comes up a lot in school maths classrooms, but there are some interesting comparisons with Pie Charts (and even Histograms) to be noticed. There's also an opportunity for discussion on the purpose of percentages, if you look closely!
Nightingale is known very well as "the Lady with the Lamp," but her contributions to mathematics are something that many people are unfortunately unaware of. She changed the face of (and attitudes towards) data visualisation in the UK, using easily understood visuals to tell the stories embedded in data that was otherwise unreadable to non-mathematicians, including politicians and royalty.
You can find the full collection of classroom resources for the Florence Nightingale at Home project at the link below:
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