What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. ~From Hans Rosling Bio on TED.com

Hans Rosling is a professor of Global Health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He is also the professor you wish you had had, particularly in the hard subjects like economics, science, and statistics. His talks are captivating, but also offer many lessons in style for speakers.

• Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm for his subject is immediate and contagious. At times it reaches the high pitch of a sportscaster, which is remarkable when you realize that he is bringing to life not just statistics, but the world we live in.
• Hans Rosling is one of the world’s “100 most important global thinkers” of 2009, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.
• He founded a non-profit organization called Gapminder which not only “unveils the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view,” but also closes the gaps in our perception based on the stereotypes we have accepted, and the inertia of lazy thinking.
• The world is a fascinating place, a living organism with dimensions that far exceed our five senses, and also the extension of those senses with technology such as satellites, the Internet, and the global telecommunications system. However, our mind is less limited than our senses, and Hans Rosling has a gift of being able not only to talk about vast trends shaping our lives, but also to show it to you in a way that is instantly understandable.
• He intermingles humor and rhythm in his presentation in a way that is captivating to the end, and deserves the great applause he gets from one of the world’s most demanding audiences at TED.
• He has a mission to give the world access to the vast quantities of data that sleep in our databases, to make it visible through his software, and searchable through the Internet.
• As you watch trends unfold like a global climate tracker on the big screen, you feel a sense of awe and optimism, in spite of all of the problems we have.
• Most of all, Hans Rosling has a gift for tapping into our world, and transporting us into the World.