Armed with colorful animated graphs that show statistical trends over time, with moving bubbles and flowing curves, global health statistician Hans Rosling told a Harvard audience that it’s a myth that the world can be neatly divided among “developed” and “developing” nations. He showed how some of the so-called “developing” nations have made significant progress in income, infant mortality, literacy, and other measures of success.
Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute—as well as a physician and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the visualization software—spoke in Paine Hall on October 25, 2012 at the second annual David K. Pickard Memorial Lecture, cosponsored by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), the Harvard Statistics Department, and the Harvard Foundation. Earlier the same day, Rosling gave a spirited lecture to a capacity crowd in HSPH’s Kresge G-2 lecture hall, where he was introduced by HSPH Dean Julio Frenk as a “statistician who is also a celebrity” and one of the most-watched professors on YouTube.