Ace Statistician and Trendalyzer Rockstar Hans Rosling Passes Away

Ace Statistician (सांख्यिकीविद) and Trendalyzer Rockstar Hans Rosling Passes Away A reliable (विश्वसनीय) and trustworthy (भरोसेमंद) voice for the value of statistics will be missed with Rosling’s passing – especially in this time when its stock is at an all-time low.Hans Rosling – doctor, health researcher, educator, communicator par excellent and open-data advocate – passed away on February

7, 2017, in Uppsala, Sweden. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer(अन्नाशय का कैंसर ) a year ago. Rosling is best known for his TED talks and was a great believer in the liberating potential (क्षमता) of globalisation. Influenced(प्रभावित)  by his early research in Africa, he decided that it wasn’t germs (रोगाणु) alone that caused disease. “Extreme poverty produces diseases. Evil forces hide there,” he said in an interview to the journal Nature in 2016. In his eyes, to be a good epidemiologist, he had to become a good economist first. But he shied away from prescription, saying in another interview, “Everybody wanted to say, ‘do this, do that’. Nobody took it as their task to describe the world as it was. So that is what I did.”

It was the enthusiasm and the humour with which he approached this task, describing the world through data and statistics, that made him a global sensation and the definition of a 21st-century public intellectual. He pioneered a five-dimensional chart using software built by his son, Ola Rosling. This software, Trendalyzer, was acquired by Google and is now freely available; even non-programmers can generate equally spiffy motion charts using basic spreadsheets. These charts allow the usual two variables: one on the x-axis and one on the y-axis of the graph. Then, the size and colour of the bubbles allow for two more variables and, finally, if you hit the play button, you could see how the graph evolved over time as numbers rose, fell and came to be.

When people first saw it on the TED stage in 2006, it was an instant hit. Since then, Rosling has been a regular at the conference, speaking at least nine other times on topics from HIV to population growth.