Counting : humans, history and the infinite lives of numbers

Wardhaugh, Benjamin, 1979-2025

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Summary

What has counting meant to different cultures and different individuals? Historian and mathematician Benjamin Wardhaugh explores stories from all over the world and from every period of human history, from the African Stone Age to cyberspace; from Assyrian kings to Chinese peasants. Weaving these histories together, Wardhaugh shows the ways in which counting has been continually reinvented over time, through language, writing, counters and machines. He illustrates how counting has shaped culture, and culture has shaped counting, in a vast story as wide, deep, and tangled as the story of human culture: the story of human attempts to find some order in an unruly world; or, perhaps, to impose on a reluctant world the order that humans find within themselves.