Data Wizard Hans Rosling Passes Away

The man who made us believe in a better world, Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician, and public speaker Hans Rosling has passed away at the age of 68 on the early hours of this morning (February 7th) from pancreatic cancer. Rosling possessed a deep passion for statistics and rigorous research with his foundation Gapminder,  which he set up in 2007, Gapminder was an independent Swedish foundation and fact tank ‘fighting the devastating misconceptions about global development.’ He also worked as a professor at the Karolinska Institute.
In probably his most famous display of data mastery, his online lecture ‘200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats’ displayed a timeline in which almost all nations in the world had progressed at an incalculable pace including developing nations.


Gapminder made the official statement earlier today, “Across the world, millions of people use our tools and share our vision of a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We know that many will be saddened by this message. Hans is no longer alive, but he will always be with us and his dream of a fact-based worldview, we will never let die!”