Skip to main content

The Triumph of Numbers – I. B. Cohen ****

Numbers are central to the building of our civilization, and it might seem at first sight that I. B. Cohen’s book fills us in on their creation and use. This could also be true from the subtitle “how counting shaped modern life”. To confuse things more, the cover illustration shows Euclid, at work on geometry, so you might think it’s a history of mathematics (not quite the same thing as numbers). In fact it’s neither – Cohen’s book is really a history of statistics, and none the worse for that: it’s a fascinating subject, but perhaps the “s” word was considered too off-putting for the general reader.
Although written by an academic, this isn’t by any means a dull, uninspiring textbook of a tome. It’s short, pithy and often surprising. There is just the occasional point where Cohen has been allowed to slip into academic habits – notably in some rather uninspiring quotes and a couple of unnecessarily long lists – but for the rest it is a highly readable book, picking up on some key individuals as well as giving the broad sweep of the way statistics have influenced life.
Some of the individuals will be unknown to the general reader, like the great Quetelet, but others are big names you might not associate with the field. Perhaps the first to make an impact is King David. The Biblical consequences of David taking a count of the people had such an impact that they will still getting in the way of censuses in the 1700s. Then there were characters like Dickens and Florence Nightingale, both of whom get a chapter practically to themselves.
Dickens weighs in against statistics, championing the individual against statistical figures that make a few people’s suffering seem unimportant against the whole. It’s a technique that is still strongly used by TV. We are shown an individual’s plight and it doesn’t matter that that the company says 99% of their customers are satisfied, or the hospital says that the drug this person wants is only available for people who are (statistically) likely to benefit. The message is, the individual is more important than statistics. While in a sense it’s true, it is also misleading. Unless a medical system or a welfare system or an aid organization has infinite resources, there will always have to be prioritization and dealing statistically. It’s not nice, but the alternative is treat those who shout loudest and get most media coverage – which isn’t right either.
Florence Nightingale, who we generally remember for her nursing, comes through as a huge supporter of statistics. It’s fascinating seeing Nightingale’s demand that hospitals should be compared to see which is better and which worse on a statistical basis, that they should have standard record keeping and so forth – all requirements that have recently surfaced again in modern medicinal management. Nightingale was also a pioneer in the use of graphics to present statistics in a more approachable way.
Even if you find statistics boring, don’t be put off. This little book (just the right length for a popular science book of this kind) will make you realize how important this branch of mathematics is to everyday life, and will surprise and amuse you along the way. Not a bad achievement for a topic like this.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more