The Triumph of Numbers
I. B. Cohen’s last book, published after his death. Nine chapters, nine moments in which counting changed how people understood the world: the first censuses, Graunt’s bills of mortality, Quetelet’s average man, Florence Nightingale’s diagrams, the rise of statistics in medicine and social policy. Cohen was a historian of science first, which is why the writing carries the maths.
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Alex Bellos
But this one – very short – was only published after he died. Again, the difficulty in maths writing is often that the mathematicians don’t know how to write and the non-mathematicians don’t really get the maths. But Cohen is an amazing historian, so although what he has chosen is a massive subject, he has only nine chapters which are nine moments in the history of numbers.
Interview · November 2012
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