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  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.

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  Science

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  Connor shows how number is essential to literary criticism, music, visual art and even to pleasure . . . It is an indication of the richness of Connors 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 .

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  Times Higher Education

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  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.

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  Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Sense of Style

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  My favourite polymath now deconstructs anti-numerical animus within the humanities and the number magic of the statistical ideologues. Conner finds number everywhere: meter, rhythm, cycle, pattern, repetition, street numbers, PIN numbers, grids, graphs, tipping points, multitudes and the masses. His criticisms of critique notwithstanding, no humanist has thought more deeply about number in everyday life since before the rationalization of knowledge.

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  Regenia Gagnier, author of The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society and Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole

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  This is a fascinating book. It is not an exploration of the study of mathematics, nor an explanation of mathematical principles, as it is a commentary upon life and the critical place of numeracy within it

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  Methodist Recorder

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  This is a book about our relationship with numbers rather than the numbers themselves, and the way they influence all spheres of human activity including art, music, poetry and literature . . . an interesting take

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  The Tablet

1 Vernacular Mathematics

2 Quantality

3 Horror of Number

4 Modern Measures

5 Lots

6 Hilarious Arithmetic

7 Playing the Numbers

8 Keeping the Beat

9 The Numerate Eye

10 Enough

References

Photo Acknowledgements

Index

Steven Connor is Professor of English and Director of Research at the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College London. He is the author of eighteen books, most recently The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019).