Time has its “Person of the Year.” Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year’s most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. Here’s Bill Gates’s.

Infographic by Thomas Porostocky for WIRED.

“I love this graph because it shows that while the number of people dying from communicable diseases is still far too high, those numbers continue to come down.  In fact, fewer kids are dying, more kids are going to school and more diseases are on their way to being eliminated.  But there remains much to do to cut down the deaths in that yellow block even more dramatically.  We have the solutions.  But we need to keep the up support where they’re being deployed, and  pressure to get them into places where they’re desperately needed.”

– Bill Gates is Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.