Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation.
He is well known for his very lively TED presentations, where he presents in a most lively way statistics about health and income across countries and across time. I like very much his presentations for two reasons. First, he uses an extremely nice programs that shows graphically the evolution of several indicators (life expectancy, income, HIV prevalence, etc.) across time for basically any country in the world. This package is very easy to use and can be accessed at the Gapminder website. By making these indicators easily accessible for so many countries and so many years, the "big picture" very often leaps on to you. And this is the second reason why I adore his presentations: most often, they show how tremendously human lives have improved during the last decades, especially but not only for the less developed countries. This message ("for a fact-based world view" is the slogan at the top his website) clashes so much with the ever-gloomier viewpoint in Continental Europe in general and in France in particular that it is a really joy to look at his presentations.
His latest one, called "200 years, 200 countries, 4 years", is a true delight: check it on YouTube.
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