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Loading... The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Lifeby I. Bernard Cohen
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A short, enjoyable history of how statistics came about, why it was resisted, and how it helped improve our understanding. There is stuff here I hadn't come across before in histories of science...like Adolphe Quetelet and why he was so influential, and how Florence Nightingale had a 'passion for statistics'. no reviews | add a review
The great historian of science I. B. Cohen explores how numbers have come to assume a leading role in science, in the operations and structure of government, in marketing, and in many other aspects of daily life. Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquity--taxes, head counts for military service--but not until the Scientific Revolution in the twelfth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. Cohen shines a new light on familiar figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Dickens; and he reveals Florence Nightingale to be a passionate statistician. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, an appreciation of the essential nature of statistics. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)519.509Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics Applied Mathematics, Probabilities Statistical MathematicsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The book is composed of many short chapters at first, but then concludes with two long chapters on Quetelet and Florence Nightingale. The focus seems to go from a critical analysis of numbers in society/politics, but then turns into biography. I wish the author had stayed focused on one or the other because both treatments are superficial. Surprisingly, computers -- humanity's number machines -- play a very small part of this book and are finally mentioned in the epilogue very cursorily.
While I'm very critical of the book overall, the things that shined were the historical anecdotes. Here are some highlights:
- p.19 — Egyptians were able to write large numbers in 3500 BCE
- p.19 — A description of how numbers can prove the feasibility of a reverse-engineered method thought to be used by Egyptians to build the pyramids.
- p.20 — Pyramids were tallest structure until Eiffel Tower
- p.29 — An account of census taking in the Bible: “Go number Israel and bring the number to David so that he might “know it”".
- p.30 — The mystery of the "sin" of census taking. Why did David sin by ordering a census and lead to death by plague of 70,000?
- p.28 — In the Bible, census takers were called “enumerators”.
- p.36 — The birth of modern science was based on direct confrontation of nature by experiment and obseration, but more importantly a dependence on the numbers (numerical measurement) of actual experience.
- p.37 — [For ancients prior to the Scientific Revolution] the goal of science was not to seek laws of nature expressed in terms of numbers or number-relations.
- p.46 — Leeuwenhoek makes a scale argument about sperm. He calculates that there's more sperm than the number of people the Earth can support.
- p.103 — The origin of the word statistics is from “statist” in Germany and is tied to politics.
- p.62 — Numerology is used to conveniently prove “evidence” against the papacy.
- p.101 — Lavoisier belived the “science of political economy” would cease to exist because all problems would be solved with no disagreements whatsoever using mathematics.
- p.97 — By 1800, it was the age of precision. In measuring time alone, there was an increase in precision of a factor of 200 compared to the 1 minute of arc in Tycho Brahe’s time.
- p.119 — Guerry’s use of the word “ordonnateur” may have led to the official French word for computer, “ordinateur”.
- The budget of crimes as statistics comes of age: “Society prepares the crime, and the guilty person is only the instrument”
- Charles Dickens was concerned about the use of averages to justify treatment of the common person. The use of an "average" justified bad working conditions.
- Joyce’s Ulysses was allowed to be published and distributed in the US based on Supreme Court Judge Woolsey’s decision that a person with “average sex instincts” would not be affected by the book. “L’homme moyen sensuel”. Already a ruling was based on an "average".
- p. 171 — The free will of admins (a scary thought). “For Nightingale, what mattered was the free will of administrators, who can choose whether to try to change the conditions that affect the way people act.”
- p. 173 — Nightingale wanted to "Bring mankind to perfection".
- p.174 — Nightingale believed that "Diagrams afford relief to the mind"
I was delighted to read some historical bits about one of my favorite scientists, James Clerk Maxwell. His wit came through when he satirized the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). “Ye British Asses, who expect to hear/ Ever some new thing.” (p. 149). A historical link is also unearthed between Maxwell and Quetelet. “The two primary founders of the modern kinetic theory of gases, based on considerations of probability, were James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. Both acknowledged their debt to Quetelet… there is an influence of the social sciences on the natural sciences.” (p.145).
This book awarded me some interesting ideas, but there are better books on the history of math and numbers, especially by Morris Kline. Read this if you are interested in historical anecdotes over understanding mathematical progress.