Contemporary Visualists

Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic, statistician, and public speaker.
He was the Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-
founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the
Trendalyzer software system.

Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on the 27th of July 1948. From 1967 to 1974
Rosling studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1972 he studied
public health at St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore, India. He became a licensed
physician in 1976 and from 1979 to 1981 he served as District Medical Officer in
Nacala in northern Mozambique. On 21 August 1981, Rosling began investigating an
outbreak of konzo, a paralytic disease first described in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. His investigations earned him a Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 1986.

Rosling took his interest in global health and developed stunning visualizations about
it using statistical methods and data from the UN. He was a noted TED speaker and
one of his most interesting TED talks is “Asia’s Rise: How and When” (Rosling 2009).
In this video, Hans shows trends of the Western countries vs. Developing countries
like India and China and makes predictions using stunning visualizations like the
Bubble chart. He also predicts the exact date on which India and China will move
ahead of USA as strong economic forces.
In this chart Rosling describes the relative standings of countries in terms of Income
versus Lifespan. He started his analysis from year 1856 and this is where various
countries stand till now. With the current growth trends, Rosling predicted that India
and China will once again be the global leaders in Income and Healthcare by the year
2048.

Hans was the co-founder and developer of the Gapminder Foundation which is
committed to promoting global sustainable development through the understanding of
statistics and data describing issues at the local, national, and global level. One of the
most important goals of the Gapminder foundation is to end ignorance in the world by
developing fact-based visualizations to present the world as it is (Ruan et al. 2017).

As part of Gapminder, Hans Rosling has developed many interactive and intuitive
visualizations. Gapminder provides free teaching material to dismantle
misconceptions and promote a fact-based worldview (Rosling, n.d.).

David McCandless
David McCandless is a British data-journalist and his blog Information is
Beautiful (McCandless 2018) hosts some of the most visually stunning graphs,
charts, and maps on a wide range of topics like science, food, dogs and countries.
One such chart, International Number Ones: Because every country is good at
something (according to data), is a captivating work that displays something each
country is the best at (McCandless 2016). The visualizations on this website are
updated and revised whenever new data is available.

One such chart, International Number Ones: Because every country is good at
something (according to data), is a captivating work that displays something each
country is the best at (McCandless 2016). The visualizations on this website are
updated and revised whenever new data is available.