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9781780238258

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Reviews

'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

Author Information

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).

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