The Triumph of Numbers

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-taxess head counts for military service-butt 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.