The Triumph of Numbers

How Counting Shaped Modern Life
I.B. Cohen
April 2005 / hardcover / 224 pages / Science/Mathematics
WW Norton

From the pyramids to mortality tables, Galileo to Florence Nightingale, a vibrant history of numbers and the birth of statistics.

Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquity—tax collection, head counts for military service—but not until the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. The late I. B. Cohen explores how numbers have come to assume a leading role in science, in the operations and structure of government, in the analysis of society, in marketing, and in many other aspects of daily life. He shows how number problems of government, science, and engineering led to the invention of the computer. He shines a new light on familiar figures like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Charles Dickens, and he reveals Florence Nightingale as a passionate statistician. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, and an appreciation and understanding of the essential nature of statistics.

I. B. Cohen (1914-2003) was Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, the author of many books, and the founder of Harvard’s History of Science Department.