The Triumph of Numbers – Cohen (2005)

My new job involves working with numbers. A lot. So, I started reading about using numbers, and I very much enjoyed ‘The Triumph of Numbers’ by I.B. Cohen (2005). This book gives an historical account not only of how numbers were used in different times, but also of ‘how counting shaped modern life’.

The books starts out by illustrating the power of numbers. Just by using very simple calculations, Cohen quickly arrives at the conclusion that the building of the ancient pyramids involved placing one giant block of stone in the structure, every two minutes. Since the weight of such stones is enormous, this required quite advanced techniques to achieve. Knowing the vast size of such an operation, this helps us to gain an understanding in how the Egyptians may have done it, and the level of technology available to them.

For long, people have been fascinated by numbers. Cohen’s description of the history of using numbers therefore starts with numerology. The reader is treated with lovely exercises is numerology: it is quite amazing how we can prove about anything, simply by reordering numbers that somehow correspond to letters. If only there was an empirical basis for such magic.

Off to more serious applications of numbers (by today’s standards), Cohen locates the proper start of using numbers in Hutcheson’s Moral Arithmetic. Hutcheson used formulae (and which are based on numbers) to make his claims about morality. Here, numbers were only used to illustrate a claim, but not much later people started to relate such numbers to observable phenomena. An example of this Benjamin Franklin, who used his mathematical genius to find arguments based on numbers for his political claims regarding the safety of inoculation against smallpox. He used numbers to show it was safe to have your children inoculated.
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