Hans Rosling: the man who makes statistics sing "That's an exceptionally stupid citation," says Rosling, who reckons it is most often employed by people who have a fear of maths. I have never seen a clever use of it. A professor in international health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Rosling has used his moving graphs to illustrate everything from the percentage of women worldwide using contraception, to the average amount of sleep enjoyed per night in various countries. The visual power of his graphs means he is often mentioned in the same breath as David McCandless and Edward Tufte, pioneers of the infographic; the visual representation of statistics in a striking and easy-to-understand way. And, like McCandless and Tufte, Rosling uses his graphs for a serious purpose: to highlight widely held misconceptions. "Statistics tell us if the things we think are actually true," he says. For example, most men think they are better drivers than women but the statistics show that men have almost double the number of fatal accidents. As part of his ambition to educate people about the world they live in, Rosling appears in an hour-long BBC Two programme tonight. At first glance, the show, which is called Don't Panic: The Truth About Population, was a riposte to the apocalyptic doom-mongering that has been spearheaded in recent months by the Microsoft scientist Stephen Emmott. In 10 Billion, his play and subsequent book of the same name, Emmott, who is British, says that we should treat the issue of the world's population "with the same urgency we'd give if we'd just discovered an asteroid on a collision path with Earth, likely to wipe out 70 per cent of all life." In some ways, Rosling actually goes further than Emmott, using projections from the UN Population Division that suggest global population will rise from its current level of seven billion to hit 11billion at the end of this century. However, his response to the issue is a little more measured. "We face huge challenges," Rosling says. But do you solve problems by panicking? Did Britain win the war for us against Hitler by panicking? More efficient use of resources will be required to meet these challenges, climate change will have to be confronted head-on, while agricultural yields and irrigation must improve markedly to feed the rapidly growing population of Africa. But, Rosling says, as fundamental and far-reaching as these challenges may be, they are surmountable. And we'd all better hope that he's right. Because a near 50 per cent increase in global population by the end of the century is already a done deal. In the BBC programme, Rosling explains that the mechanism that will power population growth on such a scale has already - and irreversibly - been put into motion and to suggest that efforts should be made to limit its growth is to effectively propose a "holocaust" and prepare "the intellectual ground for killing people." This is because of a phenomenon that Rosling describes as "Peak Child." Briefly put, the surge in the number of people on Earth isn't any longer being caused by more people being born, but because of those who are alive. There are now more children on the planet than ever (about two billion under the age of 15) but the global decline in birth rates means that the number has levelled off, and is not expected to increase. The reason the global population will continue to rise until around 2100 is because of a "demographic lag" and longer life expectancies. Bill Gates says Rosling's work persuaded him to give billions to the developing world So, the good news is that one of the major challenges facing the planet - the increasing number of births - has been met. But, much to Rosling's dismay, few people seem to realise this or, indeed, other truths about the world. Straight out of medical school, Rosling spent two years in Mozambique as one of only two qualified doctors in a hospital that served an area of 300,000 people. His experiences here pushed him towards statistics in an effort to quantify the gulf in living standards but it wasn't until he joined the Karolinska Institute that he realised the gaping holes in people's knowledge of the world - and resolved to fill them. He did a test in which students were presented with five pairs of countries - Sri Lanka and Turkey; Poland and South Korea; Malaysia and Russia; Pakistan and Vietnam; Thailand and South Africa - and asked to pick the country in each pair that had twice the child mortality rate of the other. The answers were, respectively, Turkey, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa, and the students did so badly that Rosling concluded, they must have been victim to preconceived, outdated ideas. In fact, he points out, they did worse than a chimpanzee would have done if he'd been set the test with the answers written on pairs of bananas. As you might expect, the great British public suffers from similar problems to Rosling's Swedish students. In modern-day Bangladesh, for example, the average number of children per woman has fallen from seven to just over two since 1972. But given a four-answer multiple choice question, only 12 per cent of people in this country answered correctly. The results for a similar question about the global literacy rate (which, in reality, stands at about 80 per cent) was answered correctly by only 8 per cent of respondents. It's the sort of thing that motivated Rosling to set up the non-profit organisation Gapminder in 2005, and make free, up-to-date statistics and educational resources available to as many people as possible. Gapminder's mission is to "fight devastating ignorance with fact-based world views that everyone can understand." "If people are convinced beyond all doubt that in Muslim countries women have [an average of] five children and that Islam is a religion that can never change and that Muslims will never use condoms or the pill, then they will make a lot of mistakes in their lives," says Rosling. "We want people to think: "Wow. Muslims are just like me."" Another of the common misconceptions that Rosling hopes to skewer is the perceived division between "The West" and the rest of the world. He shows, with another of his moving graphs, that back in the Sixties, there was a relatively clear divide between the rich nations and the poor ones. However, today, with the successes of China, India and Brazil, and with countries such as Nigeria and Ghana beginning to follow their lead, that gap has closed to such an extent that a binary distinction between "developed" and "developing" or between "The West" and the rest, is a false one. However, Rosling is quick to add that there remain people in the world who are desperately poor, or under-represented, and that statistics don't sufficiently explain what their lives are like. "The world can never be understood without numbers," he says, "but it can never be understood with only numbers because there is that dimension that is not numeric. Gender equality is a typical example - what you cannot measure is the main problem. But as much of the world draws level in terms of wealth and health with what Rosling calls "the old West," what are the implications for the UK and one of David Cameron's favourite buzzwords, the "Global Race"? "It's a fine concept," Rosling says. But how is Britain winning it? By having a fine car industry like Germany? No, British cars are gone. I say something about particularly strong recent figures for UK car manufacturing, but it doesn't put him off his stride. He settles back into his own version of Socratic Method. What does Britain do? Services? Yes, and the creative sector. You are strong in research, art, music and you made the most magnificent Olympics we've ever seen. So you compete in the things that you are very good at. That's what the global race is about. Rosling's own experience of growing up with limited means clearly informs much of his work. He remembers vividly the occasions when his family first got a washing machine, a flush lavatory and a car. And his extra curricular activities are also instructive. The fact that the professor's main hobby is sword swallowing, and that there is a video on YouTube of him doing just that (skip to 8 mins 30secs on film below), tells you he is not exactly a run-of-the-mill academic. Before our time is up we talk about ageing populations. Rosling, unsurprisingly, is passionate about the subject. A demonstration against plans to raise the retirement age to 65 by French students was "the most pathetic thing," he says. He prefers the stance taken by the prime minister in Sweden, who has suggested that the youth of today will have to work until they are 75. The concept of retirement is interesting - that you suddenly leave active life. When we live longer, are we disabled for a longer time before we die or not? The whole structure of the economy will have to change. Rosling seems determined to practise what he preaches, for now. Gapminder has recently launched "The Ignorance Project," which will see the organisation expand on its surveys in Sweden and the UK by uncovering the most serious misconceptions. Then, of course, he will try to cure them. "I "retired" this summer," he says, with a hint of triumphalism. But out of the last 24 hours, I've worked 19 of them. Don't Panic: The Truth About Population is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm