The activity below is the first of four produced for the University of Nottingham's Florence Nightingale Comes Home project. This one delves into Nightingale's not-so-snappily-titled Representing the Relative Mortality of the Army at Home and of the English Male Population at Corresponding Ages chart in which she compares data regarding mortality (death rates) amongst the general (male) British population for different age groups with the same data for men in the British Army.
You can see that deaths for those in the army are considerably higher than deaths for those who are not in the army, and you'd be forgiven for thinking this might be expected until you realise that this is not during a period of war and fighting: these individuals are living in army barracks in the UK in peacetime, and Nightingale's visualisation is intended to highlight the fact that they are dying in much greater numbers than should be expected. This was just one of many charts she devised to bring the desperate need for better living conditions for soldiers of the time to the attention of people who were in a position to do something about it.
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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