The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.94 (890 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393328708 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-08 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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. B. From the pyramids to mortality tables, Galileo to Florence Nightingale, a vibrant history of numbers and the birth of statistics. The great historian of science I. Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquitytaxes, head counts for military servicebut not until the Scientific Revolution in the twelfth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, an appreciation of the essential nature of statistics.
The spread of statistics, Cohen shows, undermined belief in free will, fingered impersonal social conditions rather than individual agency for previously moralized phenomena like crime and introduced the all-powerful figure of the "average man" to social thought; the numerical elevation of "head" over "heart" inspired a backlash from critics like Dickens, whose Hard Times is a manifesto against the statistical way of life. Cohen, a historian of science (the book is published posthumously), explores the colonization of the modern mind by numbers, beginning with the scientific revolution of the 17th century, which formulated the laws of nature as mathematical relationships and applied numerical tests to validate them, and ending with Florence Nightingale's harnessing of her "passion for statistics" to sanitation reform in the 19th century. From Publishers Weekly Nowadays we think about almost everything in numerical terms, but this engagi
A book about the people who were all about the numbers This is a book about statistics and economics, without the statistics and economics. Cohen explains not just what a census is, or why someone started them, but how people came to realize that census data could be useful in the first place. That's the unique feature of this book - much like the question of who was the fir. Interesting History on Use of Numbers This short book discusses the history of the use of numbers to describe the world. The author starts off with a discussion on how numbers began to be used to describe physical items. Eventually, the discussion focuses mainly on the evolution of the use of numbers in the social sciences - hence, the birth of statistics. T. "Then Triumph of Numbers" according to susan t johnson. This book was written by my late husband, IB Cohen, professor emeritus at Harvard University where he obtained his bachelors and doctoral degrees and taught for 60 years. He formulated this book over his many years of teaching and its original title was to be the importance of numbers in everyday life over the past two c
. Bernard Cohen was Victor S. He edited several series of works, including Harvard Monographs in the History of Science, Three Centuries of Science in America, and the ongoing Studies & Texts in the History of Computing. in the History of Science. I. He was the author of many books, including Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political