Florence N

Florence Nightingale was born in the family of William Nightingale, a wealthy landowner, on May 12th, 1820 in Florence, Italy. Florence Nightingale was a nurse and a public health advocate. She is as well known as the modern nursing profession pioneer. Her family moved to England giving her a British nationality. Her family was made up of intellectual freethinkers who supported women’s education. Thus, her father, William Nightingale, who received his education at the Trinity College, taught Florence and her sister mathematics, Greek and Latin. He also provided them with university education by hiring tutors in geography, botany, arithmetic and French to teach. Florence began her rigorous education when she was 12 and about the same time, she confessed: "I have the most enormous desire of acquiring. For seven years of my life I thought of little but cultivating my intellect.". In fact, namely Nightingale’s family and upbringing impacted her enthusiasm in mathematics.

Career

In early 1850s, Florence was in London, where she embarked on a nursing occupation in a Middlesex hospital that catered for diseased governesses. Her performance in the hospital was extremely impressing and earned her a promotion to superintendant within just a year after her dedication to work there. Despite the position proved to be challenging to her as there emerged an outbreak of cholera due to insanitary conditions, Nightingale perceived it as her mission to uplift hygiene practices that significantly lowered the mortality rate at the hospital in due course.

Although Florence Nightingale is better recognized for her significant contributions to nursing, her greatest accomplishments were in mathematics. She pioneered in the use of pie chart for data representation. Since majority of deaths in the Crimean war were by far as a result of poor sanitation rather than war casualties,