The activity below is the last of four produced for the University of Nottingham's Florence Nightingale Comes Home project. Relatively succinctly (if morbidly) titled, Diagram Showing the Numbers Living and Dead at the Several Ages from 20 - 40 consists of three charts, each considering how many people out of a starting value of 10,000 have died by the time they reach particular ages, in a particular category. These categories are English soldiers, Englishmen, and Englishmen in healthy districts.
Nightingale's intention was for these three charts to be compared so that a story regarding poor health in the military can be presented and easily understood. This activity allows them to be compared in a way which Florence Nightingale would never have been able to achieve. The phrase "excess of deaths" was used by Nightingale in reference to these and other data sets; a phrase which is probably familiar to anybody taking an interest in discussions (and arguments) about the Covid-19 pandemic.
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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