The activity below is the third of four produced for the University of Nottingham's Florence Nightingale Comes Home project. Less unwieldy than some of her other titles, Diagrams Constructed on the Data Furnished by the Quarter Master General's Plans for Encampment compares the population density of planned military encampments with those experienced in London.
There are two slides in the activity above: the first provides the data that Florence Nightingale was provided with, and an encouragement to think about how you might present this, either to understand it better yourself or to make a point to someone else. The second slide shows what she actually did with the data. How does it compare with what you thought on the first slide? Does it help you to understand the information better? What point do you think she was trying to make by choosing to represent it in this way?
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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