The Triumph of Numbers

"OK, so this is The Triumph of Numbers by IB Cohen, who is a scholar, an eminent historian of science and he has written many academic books. 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. It is quite hard to write good history of science because there are so many things happening in different eras and you want to choose something that explains the science but also has a bit of personality, but then again doesn’t demean it. The sort of mind that understands how to write history is very different from the mind that understands how to do maths, which is very structured. So most maths writers tend to be incredibly structured and a bit obvious. For example, they tend to do history very chronologically and can’t really do it any other way. But you can tell that Cohen has this breadth of knowledge and that he chooses the right moments and then puts them in the right context. Yes, and this is an absolutely brilliant history book – you really feel that you are in a great pair of hands. Often with the history of science you feel that the writer only really knows about the narrow subject they are writing about because it is too specialised. Here, though, you can tell that his other knowledge filters through. So he talks about Napoleon, who was a great mathematician and surrounded himself with top mathematicians. There is a great anecdote where Napoleon had just beaten the Berbers at the Battle of the Pyramids. While his generals climbed up the pyramids, he sat at the bottom and worked out that, using the stone from the Great Pyramid, you could construct a wall three metres high and, I think, a third of a metre wide that would more or less exactly match the perimeter of France. And then he had the top mathematician of the day check his calculation, which was correct. The emperor was correct! Or in fact he wasn’t emperor at the time – I think he was just the coming man. It’s a great anecdote anyway. But the book is essentially about the time from the 18th and 19th century where, thanks to Indian numbers coming into common use, all of a sudden everyone could use them. To start off with no one really had use of numbers – now in the modern world we all use numbers all the time. And this book, using a few episodes, explains the birth of statistics, the birth of graphs, of measuring. There’s a load of stuff on how the rise of numbers created a huge backlash, using the example of Charles Dickens ’s character Gradgrind in Hard Times, who cares only about measuring. He tells the story of the obscenity case against the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States, which rested on the idea of ‘the average man’. The judge referred to ‘the eyes of the average man’ but had no idea that it was a mathematical concept that had come to prominence in the 19th century with the numerical analysis of social phenomena. And that leads us into a discussion of statistics and how the bell curve plotting social data was used as an argument for eugenics, which was of course very fashionable until Hitler came along. This interview was first published in 2010."