Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity - Softcover

'Number is one of the fundamental dimensions of reality; to ignore it is to be color-blind, monolingual, housebound, blinkered. In this lively, good-humored, and erudite book, Steven Connor shows how an allergy to quantitative thinking has not served the humanities well, and that welcoming it in can only deepen our appreciation of art and literature.' - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Sense of Style; 'Full of delights and insights for mathematicians and nonmathematicians alike ... Living by Numbers turns the question of whether a problem might best be approached qualitatively or quantitatively on its head, suggesting that it misses the point. Instead of asking how the humanities and arts might respond to the expansion of statistics and data sciences, Connor asserts that the important questions about life - and the historical, philosophical, and artistic ways of addressing them - have always also been about numbers.' - Science; 'Connor shows how number is essential to literary criticism, music, visual art and even to pleasure ... It is an indication of the richness of Connor's content that frequently I wanted more ... Readers of this book will be mentally engaged in a dialogue with the author throughout ... Connor is always stimulating as well as witty .' - Times Higher Education

Ideas about quantities, magnitudes and frequencies shape and give texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream and do. In Living by Numbers, now available in paperback, Steven Connor explores the many ways in which we live in, and by, a world of numbers. The book opens up for the first time the richness, variety and subtlety of how we do things with numbers and, just as importantly, how they do things with us.