Hans Rosling, doctor who used statistics to educate millions . By Sam
Roberts New York Times . Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor who transformed
himself into a pop-star statistician by converting dry numbers into
dynamic graphics that challenged preconceptions about global health and
population growth, died Tuesday in Uppsala, Sweden. He was 68. The
cause was pancreatic cancer, according to Gapminder, a foundation he
established to generate and disseminate demystified data using images.
Even before "post-truth" entered the lexicon, Dr. Rosling was echoing
former US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's maxim that everyone is
entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts. "He challenged
the whole world's view of development with his amazing teaching
skills," Isabella Lovin, Sweden's deputy prime minister, said in a
prepared statement. On Twitter, Bill Gates remembered Dr. Rosling as a
"great friend, educator and true inspiration. A self-described
"edutainer," Dr. Rosling captivated vast audiences in TED Talks -
beginning a decade ago in front of live audiences and later viewed
online by millions - and on television documentaries like the BBC's
"The Joy of Stats" in 2010. Animated visualizations and prosaic props
(like apples and colorful Lego plastic blocks) defined him as a funky
philosopher rather than a geeky professor. "I produce a road map for
the modern world," he told The Economist in 2010. "Where people want to
drive is up to them. But I have the idea that if they have a proper
road map and know what the global realities are, they'll make better
decisions. In Dr. Rosling's version of those realities, the traditional
divide between developing and industrialized nations had become
anachronistic, since so many countries were undergoing development,
with some in Asia improving faster than some in Europe. He noted that 5
billion people continued to head toward healthier lives while 1 billion
remained mired in poverty and disease; that progress toward health and
wealth had contributed to climate change; and that the world was so
poorly governed that possibilities to improve it abounded. "I'm not an
optimist," Dr. Rosling once said. "I'm a very serious possibilist. He
predicted that the United Nations' goal of eradicating extreme poverty
by 2030 was attainable, because the tools to do so had been identified
and the share of people living in that condition had already declined
by more than half in 25 years. He also argued vigorously that
overpopulation would no longer be problematic as the world grew
wealthier and fertility rates declined. "There are so many who think
that death keeps control of population growth," he said in an interview
with The Guardian in 2013. "That's just wrong! He told The Economist:
"The only way to reach sustainable population levels is to improve
public health. Child survival is the new green. As a medical doctor,
epidemiologist, and academic, but with the flair of a performer (he
once demonstrated his expertise as a sword swallower), he delivered
counterintuitive facts, accused advocates of tweaking statistics to
advance their own causes, and debunked misapprehensions about
developing nations - although not every expert concurred. He pointed
out that Sweden had more children per woman than Iran, that Shanghai
was just as wealthy and healthy as the Netherlands, and that the
world's average life expectancy of 71 years was now closer to the
highest (84 in Japan) than to the lowest (49 in Swaziland). "They just
make it about us and them; the West and the rest," Dr. Rosling told the
journal Nature last December. "How could anyone hope to solve problems
if they didn't understand the different challenges faced, for example,
by Congolese subsistence farmers far from paved roads and Brazilian
street vendors in urban favelas? His investigation of a paralytic
disease called konzo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was
determined to be caused by ingesting naturally occurring cyanide in
cassava roots, earned him a doctorate from Uppsala University. With his
son Ola and his daughter-in-law, Anna Rosling Ronnlund, Dr. Rosling
established Gapminder in 2006 while he was a professor of global health
at the Karolinska Institute, a medical university outside Stockholm. It
aims to chart trends and fight what it calls "devastating ignorance
with fact-based worldviews everyone can understand. It derived its name
from the London Underground's recorded warnings to passengers to "mind
the gap" between a subway car and the platform. Gapminder's data images
are designed to evoke the divide between statistics and the misleading
ways in which they are sometimes interpreted. "It's like the emperor's
new clothes, and I'm the little child saying: 'He's nude! He's nude!
Dr. Rosling told The Guardian. Brandishing his bubble chart graphics
during TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Talks, he often
capsulized the macroeconomics of energy and the environment in a
favorite anecdote about the day a washing machine was delivered to his
family's cold-water flat. "My mother explained the magic with this
machine the very, very first day," he recalled. "She said: 'Now Hans,
we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we
can go to the library. Because this is the magic: You load the laundry,
and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the
machines, children's books. And Mother got time to read to me. "Thank
you, industrialization," Dr. Rosling said. "Thank you, steel mill. And
thank you, chemical processing industry that gave us time to read
books.
