- MODERN EUROPEAN WOMEN 87
solve urgent practical problems. Most often today such work comes from physi-
cists, who state mathematical conjectures based on their physical intuition; the
conjectures are then either proved or modified by other mathematicians or mathe-
matical physicists. The most useful mathematics from a social point, of view is the
mathematics used every day to settle important questions. Today, that generally
means statistics. We are used to seeing histograms, line graphs, and pie charts in our
newspapers, and most professional journals of even moderate technical pretensions
will have articles referring to standard deviations, chi-square tests, p-numbers, and
related concepts. The graphical representations of data that we are used to seeing
in our newspapers owe something to the imagination of this remarkable woman.
She was born in Italy on May 12,1820, the second daughter of a wealthy couple
who were taking an extended trip. She was about one year younger than Victo-
ria, heir to the British throne. As happened with many women of achievement,
Florence's father took an interest in the education of his daughters and both en-
couraged and tutored them. Her decision to enter the health professions, taken in
1837, the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne, was made, she later said,
as the result of a direct (though nonspecific) call from God. By the late 1840s
she had persuaded her family to allow her to travel on the Continent and study
the operation of hospitals. She had less technical training and inclination than did
Maria Gaetana Agnesi, but she was able to integrate her technical competence with
the charitable and public health activity that was her primary occupation.
The central episode in the life of Florence Nightingale was the Crimean War
of 1854-1855, in which Britain and France compelled Russia to remove its fleet
and fortifications from the Black Sea. Deaths from battle in this war, which was
essentially a siege of the fortress of Sevastopol, were fewer than deaths from disease.
Florence Nightingale was appointed to lead a party of 38 nurses to the front to
treat wounded soldiers. Seeing the conditions that existed there, she was inspired
to write, in collaboration with William Farr (1807 1883), a series of papers on
public health, complete with statistics on the numbers and cause of deaths, which
were presented in the form of a polar diagram, an early version of what we now
recognize as a pie chart (Plate 5). In 1860, for this and other such innovations
in data handling, she became the first woman elected a fellow of the Statistical
Society. Because of her dedication to caring for the sick, comparisons with Maria
Gaetana Agnesi naturally come to mind. One important difference between the two
women appears to be Florence Nightingale's greater organizing skills and her belief
in social rather than individual action. The explanation probably lies in the fact
that the two women were born a century apart and that Florence Nightingale lived
in a society where people felt themselves to have some influence over government.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who grew up in the artistically fruitful but politically chaotic
eighteenth-century Italy, probably did not have that sense of a duty to participate
in political life.
Despite being an invalid for many years before her death at age 90 in 1910,
Florence Nightingale worked constantly to improve health standards. To this end
she published over 200 books and pamphlets, many of which are still read and still
influential today. In 1907 she became the first woman awarded the Order of Merit.
A museum in London is dedicated to her life and work, and links to information
about her can be found at its website:
http://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk