Florence Nightingale saved people with her grasp of numbers | Hacker News Reader

Florence Nightingale saved people with her grasp of numbers

huffingtonpost.com.au

86 pointskschua11 comments

For those, like me, who find the writing style somewhat annoying, this is the part of the article that relates directly to the title:

> Imagine the situation Florence Nightingale confronted in the Crimea. Everyone knew that, in a war, soldiers get shot. Everyone knew that people who are shot tend to die. What they didn't know was that the vast majority of deaths in the Crimean War weren't caused by wounds at all -- they were caused by diseases like cholera and typhus. Thus military leaders didn't implement the basic sanitary precautions in field hospitals and military barracks that would save lives by stopping the spread of disease.

> Florence Nightingale saw the problem, but she needed her own ammunition. So she counted the dead, collected the data, and displayed it in a polar area diagram.

> It was a credible, clear and compelling display of the causes of death. And suddenly the problem was no longer too abstract to ignore. It was fixable.

> That is how a woman -- a nurse -- took on the top brass of the British military and won.

Reading the wikipedia page with the section specific to the title is a better experience also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#Statistic...

They didn't even show the plot

Token from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nightingale-mortality.jpg

I quite enjoyed the writing style.

Interesting that despite this being an Australian speech reported on an Australian site, there is no mention of Nightingale's role in the development of nursing in Australia, at the request of the great Henry Parkes. Here's his granddaughter (herself a nursing educator) on the subject:

http://www.nurseuncut.com.au/from-nightingale-nurses-to-mode...

If only we had statesmen of the calibre of Parkes today, instead of the shameful and mediocre crop we've got now.

Totally off topic, but I was wondering if that Parkes somehow had the Parkes radiotelescope named after him. The timing seemed wrong, but it seemed worth checking.

Turns out he visited the town once, so they renamed it after him. Chuck Norris, eat your heart out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes,_New_South_Wales

Yes that says quite a bit about how highly he was regarded, plus he did also assist in promoting the survey of the town, opening it up for development. Parkes was central in many aspects of development of the colony over his lifetime, including bringing to an end convict transports from England, providing universal education, commissioning landmarks such as Martin Place and Centennial Park which frame modern Sydney, and above all getting the various colonial states around the table to form the great nation of Australia.

>LESSON TWO: Learning maths is hard.

I wish this were more widely accepted, rather than the fallacy of "math people". Mastering even undergraduate level mathematics is the single hardest intellectual pursuit any human can undertake. There's no way around it. It's just an insanely hard thing to do. I've been taking remedial math courses in prep for a CS degree after 10 years in the industry, and it is absolutely maddening.

That would be fine, except that everything true is trivial.

On a more serious note on the original comment: there is also something to be said about the label of 'genius'. Take Ramanujan and his unusually strong self-directed efforts at the age of 16, for instance. Often there's more emphasis on the mystical aspect of his narrative.

I think the point on how mathematics is incrementally built is the main take away.

My issue with many of the maths courses especially in early primary classes is that they lack rigour. It seems to be about solving practical problems (calculating grocery lists totals etc.) rather than really understanding what happens when you do arithmetic. There are some things that genuinely help when memorised (e.g. the times tables) when you're doing arithmetic but that's looked down upon.

I'm trying to remedy this with my own children but it's a bit of an uphill battle. This article is definitely something I can use in my attempts.

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