Florence Nightingale: Legendary? She's Absolutely Legendary! But for way more than you think!

Florence Nightingale is definitely on my Phenomenal Figures list down the line. In fact that's coming up soon! Here's some written words for now from an old post from a few years ago with a few updates. I'll go into things a little further in the video.

Original Post:

You know who doesn't get enough credit but is rightfully getting more over time? Florence Nightingale. She was a badass. I remember growing up you heard references, and the consensus was she's a really good nurse. This is a gross understatement and she did much more, something I didn't know until I was an adult.

She revolutionized the medical field and this was backed by her mad math skills. She did a lot of statistical analysis that made her logic hard to argue against. She also cared a lot about women getting proper math education and changed the way we look at personal hygiene as well. She was an incredible mathematician/statistician in addition to a life saver, and through her work arguably impacted and saved more lives than she got credit for.

Women have a sad history of getting overlooked and math is no exception unfortunately. My old school is amazing in some ways and when I was in college I thought our department had a good distribution gender wise. I found out as I got older this isn't the norm. It still feels like largely a man's game.

I have some friends that teach middle school and that feels like an age group where women almost feel pushed out of STEM. I am hoping this changes and those friends are certainly doing their part. We all have to though. Math is not for a specific gender. For the record it not for anyone in particular. It's for everyone.

In summation though, Florence Nightingale was awesome! She was a nurse, an awesome one and that would be impressive enough. However, she was also a mathematic, a statistician. She was important to math, she was important in medicine. Even those who know her for the nurse part, don't always know how deep her impact goes. It's wild!