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The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (Paperback)

by IB Cohen (Author) "We live in a world of numbers ..." (more)

3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.; New edition edition (11 Aug 2006)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0393328708
ISBN-13: 978-0393328707
Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 13.5 x 1.8 cm

Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 812,740 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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"Brief, lively, and highly entertaining." The New York Times"

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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 - for example, in taxes or 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 analysed. Cohen shines a new light on familiar figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Carlyle 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.

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First Sentence
We live in a world of numbers. Read the first page

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes Fascinating, Often Frustrating, Poorly Organized, 16 Jun 2005

By	J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (Hardcover)

This posthumously published book was finished only days before his death by I. Bernard Cohen, the founder of the Harvard Department of the History of Science. One has the sense that had he had more time to work on it it might have been better organized and more tightly focused. Although there are many fascinating facts and anecdotes in this short outline of the effects of numbers on modern life and the development of their use over the centuries, there are many divagations that don't add much to the story. When he takes time to correct the French in someone's book title, one wonders why he wastes space on that when he doesn't make it clear why he was citing the book in the first place. Still we meet such well-known characters as Kepler and Galileo, Jefferson and Franklin, and lesser known but fascinating thinkers like Andr� Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet who advanced the science of statistics and applied it to such sociological concerns as crime and punishment. We meet statistical Luddites like Dickens, who thought the collection of demographic data would be used against the average man. We finish with a weak chapter about Florence Nightingale's use of statistics in the medical realm. We do not venture on into the twentieth century.

This is a variably interesting but ultimately not very useful essay, I'm afraid. It is notable for its quirkily amusing anecdotes, but rather falls down when it attempts to convey the important uses to which numbers are put in modern life.

Scott Morrison

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