Hans Rosling: the doctor who made data tell the truth

A doctor who saw poverty up close

Rosling studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University in Sweden, and also studied public health at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore, India. He became a licensed doctor in 1976. That unusual pairing, numbers and medicine, ran through everything he did later.

With his wife Agneta he went to work in Mozambique, where the family was posted to Nacala in the north. A colleague from Karolinska Institutet later wrote that the work took all his energy, and that Rosling had told him the brutality of extreme poverty only truly struck him there. That experience, the colleague wrote, turned him into a teacher who wanted everyone to understand it.

“Fame is easy to acquire, impact is much more difficult.”

— Hans Rosling, via The Guardian

From professor to edutainer

From 1997 Rosling was a professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, teaching global health. Colleagues remember a short quiz he liked to use, a handful of questions on things like child mortality in different countries. His point was that many people's picture of the world is out of date. In a 2013 interview he noted that Swedes, asked how many children are born per woman in Bangladesh, still guessed four to five.

His first TED talk in 2006 made him famous around the world. He showed animated charts in which each country was a bubble, moving year by year as its income and health changed. The Guardian later described these animated visualisations as his signature, along with his habit of using children's toys, cardboard boxes and teacups to make figures easy to grasp. He liked to call himself an edutainer.

Together with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund he founded Gapminder, a foundation that builds free tools for a fact-based view of the world. In 2007 he cut his university role to a small fraction so that most of his time could go to Gapminder. He presented BBC documentaries, including The Joy of Stats, and in 2014 he went to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak to help the government track cases and find missing data.

Factfulness and a lasting legacy

Time magazine included him in its 2012 list of the world's 100 most influential people. Rosling died on 7 February 2017 in Uppsala, aged 68, after a year-long illness. Later that year he was given the United Nations Population Award.

His last book, Factfulness, written with Ola and Anna, came out in 2018. It describes ten instincts that distort how we see the world, such as dividing everything into two camps or believing that most things are getting worse. Gapminder continues his work.

Other honours came before that. Foreign Policy listed him among 100 leading global thinkers, Fast Company named him one of the 100 most creative people in business, and the Swedish Medical Society gave him its Jubilee Prize. According to the United Nations Population Fund, he regularly gave presentations for free to raise awareness of global health issues.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was combining fields. He knew medicine and he knew statistics, so he could ask the right health questions and read the numbers behind them. Good analysts understand the subject, not only the spreadsheet.

The second was clear presentation. A table of figures for two hundred countries is hard to read; a bubble that moves across a chart is not. He chose the simplest picture that told the truth, and he practised telling the story behind it.

The third was honesty about evidence. A former colleague wrote that he would change his mind when proven wrong, as he did when large-scale HIV treatment in Africa turned out to work. He wanted people to look at all the facts, good and bad, before they argued about what to do.

The fourth was sheer effort. A fellow professor remembered driving with him every day from Uppsala to Karolinska Institutet, arriving at dawn, and once still copying factsheets for coming lectures near midnight. When colleagues suggested he rest, he would joke that he could rest after he died. Clear explanations took hours of preparation behind the scenes.