Florence Nightingale
The nurse who fought her family for permission to study mathematics, then used it to redesign an army's hospitals and invent a chart still taught in every data visualization class
Best remembered as the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was also a serious statistician who used mortality data from the Crimean War -- presented through the polar area diagram she popularized -- to force British military hospital reform. This bio covers her fight to win a mathematical education against her family's wishes, her tutoring under J.J. Sylvester, the dramatic mortality-rate drop at Scutari, her becoming the first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and her close, technical correspondence with Adolphe Quetelet.
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