A very sharp brain: Prof. Hans Rosling

A few years ago I had the chance to meet  Hans Rosling at a sum­mit by the Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship. He is a Pro­fes­sor of Inter­na­tion­al Health who devel­oped Tren­d­a­lyz­er soft­ware, a tool that brings sta­tis­tics to live with great visu­al and ani­ma­tion tech­niques. Google bought the soft­ware last March. You can find it here now.

The Finan­cial Times today has an arti­cle titled The hid­den beau­ty of num­bers (sub­scrip­tion required), with some great quotes such as “Prof. Rosling works on the premise that the world can nev­er be under­stood with­out num­bers-or with only num­bers” and “He draws an anal­o­gy with music: most peo­ple would find the writ­ten notes dull but love them when they are played. He says he wants to play the sta­tis­tics and is adamant that he has the eye of the user in mind all the time”.

Here is a full pre­sen­ta­tion at TED Talks. Enjoy a much more insigh­ful and fun way to see the world!

Two relat­ed posts:

• Micro­fi­nance, and a very sharp brain
• “Every­one a Change­mak­er”, Ashoka and Google