Theodore Porter
American historian
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Theodore Porter's Degrees
- Bachelors History University of California, Berkeley
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Why Is Theodore Porter Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, Theodore M. Porter is a professor who specializes in the history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900; and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, the latter a vast reference for sociology of quantification. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, he received the George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement from the History of Science Society.
Theodore Porter's Published Works
Published Works
- Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life@@@The Values of Precision (1996) (1111)
- The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (2020) (799)
- The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (1989) (662)
- Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (1991) (372)
- Trust in Numbers (2020) (339)
- Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto (2020) (207)
- Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science (1992) (186)
- Making Things Quantitative (1994) (159)
- Geodynamics and metallogeny of the central Eurasian porphyry and related epithermal mineral systems: A review (2014) (157)
- THE RISE OF STATISTICAL THINKING (2013) (117)
- Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004) (72)
- Changing Contours of The Social Science Disciplines (2003) (57)
- The Cambridge history of science: The modern social sciences (2003) (50)
- Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science (2014) (47)
- Thin Description: Surface and Depth in Science and Science Studies (2012) (43)
- The geology, structure and mineralisation of the Oyu Tolgoi porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum deposits, Mongolia: A review (2016) (42)
- Measuring What? (2012) (41)
- How Science Became Technical (2009) (41)
- A Statistical Survey of Gases: Maxwell's Social Physics (1981) (38)
- Economics and the History of Measurement (2001) (37)
- Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (2020) (35)
- The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet's Statistics (1985) (33)
- The Cambridge History of Science (2003) (33)
- Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic (2016) (31)
- Managing the Economy (2003) (30)
- Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit? (2006) (29)
- The promotion of mining and the advancement of science: the chemical revolution of mineralogy (1981) (28)
- Statistical and Social Facts from Quetelet to Durkheim (1995) (28)
- Natural images in economic thought: Rigor and practicality: rival ideals of quantification in nineteenth-century economics (1994) (25)
- The Modern Social Sciences (2003) (25)
- Current Understanding of Iron Oxide Associated-Alkali Altered Mineralised Systems: Part I, An Overview (2010) (25)
- Statistics and Statistical Methods (2003) (21)
- Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers (1991) (20)
- Genres and Objects of Social Inquiry, From the Enlightenment to 1890 (2003) (19)
- The Uses of the Social Sciences (2003) (18)
- Information cultures: A review essay (1995) (17)
- FOCUS ARTICLE: Measurement, Objectivity, and Trust (2003) (17)
- Regional tectonics, geology, magma chamber processes and mineralisation of the Jinchuan nickel-copper-PGE deposit, Gansu Province, China: A review (2016) (17)
- LOCATING THE DOMAIN OF CALCULATION (2008) (16)
- Genetics in the Madhouse (2018) (14)
- Statistics and the politics of objectivity (1993) (14)
- Social Surveys in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2003) (13)
- From Quetelet to Maxwell: Social Statistics and the Origins of Statistical Physics (1994) (12)
- The Culture of Quantification and the History of Public Reason (2004) (12)
- The World of Indicators: The flight of the indicator (2015) (10)
- Statistical Utopianism in an Age of Aristocratic Efficiency (2002) (9)
- :The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (2008) (9)
- Social Science and Social Planning During the Twentieth Century (2003) (9)
- Digital humanism. (2018) (9)
- Psychology in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe (2003) (9)
- Introduction: Writing the History of Social Science (2003) (9)
- The Empire of Chance: References (1989) (8)
- The Rise of Cost–Benefit Rationality as Solution to a Political Problem of Distrust (2007) (8)
- The Objective Self (2008) (8)
- Polling in Politics and Industry (2003) (8)
- Sociology in Egypt and Morocco (2003) (8)
- Statistics and Physical Theories (2001) (7)
- Signifying Little (2008) (6)
- Bringing the Psyche into Scientific Focus (2003) (5)
- Introduction: Historicizing the Two Cultures (2005) (5)
- The Social Sciences in Africa (2003) (5)
- The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (2020) (5)
- Most Often, What Is Transmitted Is Transformed (2020) (5)
- British Economic Theory From Locke To Marshall (2003) (5)
- The Quantification of Uncertainty after 1700: Statistics Socially Constructed? (1990) (4)
- The Social Sciences In China (2003) (4)
- On the Virtues and Disadvantage of Quantification for Democratic Life (2001) (4)
- The curious case of blending inheritance. (2014) (4)
- The Social Sciences in India (2003) (4)
- STATISTICS AS SOCIAL SCIENCE (2020) (4)
- Psychologism and the Child (2003) (4)
- Quantification in the History of the Social Sciences (2001) (3)
- Italian Contributions to the Methodology of Statistic (1988) (3)
- CHAPTER FIVE. Experts against Objectivity: Accountants and Actuaries (1996) (3)
- Depending on Numbers (2016) (3)
- Accounting Made Visible (1996) (3)
- The calculus of liberalism : the development of statistical thinking in the social and natural sciences of the nineteenth century (1981) (3)
- Eras of judgement (2007) (3)
- Models, Analogies, and Statistical Reason, 1760–1900 (2002) (2)
- Social interests and statistical theory. (1981) (2)
- Marx and Marxism (2003) (2)
- Robert N. Proctor;, Londa Schiebinger (Editors).Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. viii + 298 pp., tables, figs., index. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. $65 (cloth). (2009) (2)
- Schrödinger’s Goose (2008) (2)
- Cultures of Objectivity (2020) (2)
- The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (review) (1998) (2)
- BOOK REVIEW: Jack Meadows.THE VICTORIAN SCIENTIST: THE GROWTH OF A PROFESSION. London: The British Library, 2004. and Jack Morrell.JOHN PHILLIPS AND THE BUSINESS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. (2006) (2)
- Review: The History of Mathematical Tables, From Sumer to Spreadsheets (2005) (2)
- Revenge of the Humdrum: Bureaucracy as Profession and as a Site of Science (2020) (2)
- Race and The Social Sciences (2003) (2)
- 10. The Fate of Scientifi c Naturalism: From Public Sphere to Professional Exclusivity (2019) (2)
- Using Data to Understand the World (2020) (1)
- Introduction to the New Paperback Edition (2016) (1)
- The Uses of Humanistic History (1991) (1)
- Founder of Modern Economics: Paul Samuelson. Volume 1: Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948 by Roger E. Backhouse (2019) (1)
- CHAPTER ONE. A World of Artifice (2020) (1)
- P HILIP M IROWSKI and E STHER -M IRJAM S ENT (eds.), Science Bought and Sold: Essays in the Economics of Science. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. ix+573. ISBN 0-226-53857-5. £21.00, $33.00 (paperback). (2003) (1)
- The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (review) (2008) (1)
- The Empire of Chance: Statistics of the mind (1989) (1)
- Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society Washington, D.C., 27-30 December 1992 (1993) (1)
- Observations, Narrative, and Data in Nineteenth-Century Asylum Medicine (2018) (1)
- The Victorian Scientist: The Growth of a Profession (review) (2006) (1)
- Modern Facts and Postmodern Interpretations (2001) (1)
- INTRODUCTION. Cultures of Objectivity (1996) (1)
- Quantity and Polity: Asylum Statistics and the Drive for Medical Evidence (2011) (1)
- British thought on race. (1982) (1)
- Lorraine Daston. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii + 423. ISBN 0-691-08497-1, £27.50, $49.50. (1989) (1)
- Book Review:The Creative Power of Chance Remy Lestienne, E. C. Neher (2000) (1)
- Book Review:The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 Stephen M. Stigler (1988) (1)
- Karl Pearson?The Scientific Life in a (2009) (1)
- The Empire of Chance: Numbers rule the world (1989) (1)
- MEASUREMENT AND MERITOCRACY: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF IQ (2009) (1)
- Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. By Patrick Carroll. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xiv+275. $45.00. (2007) (1)
- The probabilistic revolution in physics (1989) (1)
- Accounts of Science (2009) (1)
- Social surveys in the 18th and 19th centuries (2003) (1)
- The Social Sciences in Latin America during the Twentieth Century (2003) (1)
- Politics by the Numbers 1 (2021) (1)
- New historical and philosophical perspectives on quantitative genetics. (2022) (1)
- Social Interests and Statistical Theory: Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930 . The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge. Donald A. MacKenzie. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1981 (U.S. distributor, Columbia University Press, New York). viii, 306 pp. $25. (1981) (1)
- A Plague of Data (2021) (1)
- Interpreting the Triumph of Mathematical Economics (1993) (1)
- The Social Sciences in Japan (2003) (0)
- Chapter Three. FROM NATURE'S URN TO THE INSURANCE OFFICE (2020) (0)
- Reviews of Books:The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 Bruce Curtis (2002) (0)
- Roy Weintraub, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002) pp. xiv, 313, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2871-2. (2003) (0)
- Graeme J. N. Gooday.The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice. xxv + 285 pp. illus., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $85. (2005) (0)
- Chapter Four. THE ERRORS OF ART AND NATURE (2020) (0)
- The postwar American university (1994) (0)
- Chapter Seven. TIME'S ARROW AND STATISTICAL UNCERTAINTY IN PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY (2020) (0)
- On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modem Europe. By Richard W. Hadden. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xviii, 191 (1996) (0)
- Book Reviews (2011) (0)
- The Laws that Govern Chaos (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER FIVE. Cultural Historian in a Political Age (2010) (0)
- Book Reviews (2003) (0)
- How Social Numbers Are Made Valid (2020) (0)
- Christopher Herbert.Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. xvi + 302 pp., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. $43, £27.50 (cloth); $16, £10.50 (paper). (2002) (0)
- The Mathematics of Statistics (2020) (0)
- Essay Review: Quantitative Technologies, Administrative Practices, and Statistical Minds (2009) (0)
- POLYMATHY AND DISCIPLINE (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: An Improbable Personage (2010) (0)
- Asylum accounts in health and in money (2021) (0)
- CHAPTER EIGHT. Scientific Education and Graphical Statistics (2010) (0)
- CHAPTER SEVEN. Ether Squirts and the Inaccessibility of Nature (2010) (0)
- Book Review:Who's Who in Economics: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Economists, 1700-1986 Mark Blaug (1987) (0)
- Introduction (1992) (0)
- Reviews of Books:A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour John H. Zammito (2004) (0)
- PRECISION AND TRUST: (2020) (0)
- Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 450. ISBN 0-521-35042-5. £35.00, $59.50. (1991) (0)
- Moving Knowledge (2011) (0)
- THE ERRORS OF ART AND NATURE (2020) (0)
- Book Review:The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth-Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action Stephen P. Turner (1988) (0)
- Conclusion (2020) (0)
- The Empire of Chance: Statistical probabilities, 1820–1900 (1989) (0)
- Objects and standards: on the limitations and the effects of a ritualistic fixing and measuring life (2020) (0)
- STATISTICAL LAW AND HUMAN FREEDOM (2020) (0)
- Statistics: a moral and an engaging history Stephen M Stigler Statisti (2000) (0)
- Psychiatry and its discontentsAndrewScullUniversity of California Press, 2019, 356 pp., $29.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780520305496. (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER TEN. Epilogue: Composing a Life (2010) (0)
- Statistical Methods, History of: Pre-1900 (2001) (0)
- MARGARET SCHABAS, The Natural Origins of Economics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii+231 pp., ISBN 0-226-73569-9. (2007) (0)
- GDP: Implications of a Number (2016) (0)
- CHAPTER SIX. French State Engineers and the Ambiguities of Technocracy (1996) (0)
- Physics Forged in the Tripos (2003) (0)
- Book Review:The Politics of Numbers William Alonso, Paul Starr (1990) (0)
- Book Review:The American Census: A Social History Margo J. Anderson (1989) (0)
- Experts against Objectivity: Accountants and Actuaries (2020) (0)
- Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life. By Tamara Plakins Thornton (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2016) 416 pp. $35.00 (2017) (0)
- Chapter 11. Genetic Ratios and Medical Numbers Give Rise to Big Data Ambitions in America, 1902‐1920 (2018) (0)
- Chapter Eight. THE MATHEMATICS OF STATISTICS (2020) (0)
- Erratum (2001) (0)
- Author’s response (1997) (0)
- BOOK REVIEWS (2005) (0)
- Introduction: The Statistical Office as a Social Observatory (2007) (0)
- CHAPTER TWO. How Social Numbers Are Made Valid (2020) (0)
- Shaping the Unruly Statistician (2021) (0)
- A World of Artifice (2020) (0)
- Chapter 1. Bold Claims to Cure a Raving King Let Loose a Cry for Data, 1789‐1816 (2018) (0)
- THE SCIENCE OF UNCERTAINTY (2020) (0)
- A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain. By Christopher Hamlin. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.) 342 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. Cloth, $39,95 (1991) (0)
- The Effortless Economy of Science? By Philip Mirowski. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 462 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, tables, figures. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95. ISBN: cloth, 0-822-33310-4; paper, 0-822-33322-8 (2007) (0)
- Amy Levy's Fate: Death and the Statistician (2012) (0)
- Book Review:The Norton History of the Human Sciences Roger Smith (2001) (0)
- The Empire of Chance: The inference experts (1989) (0)
- The Roots of Biometrical Statistics (2020) (0)
- The Curious Case of Academic Reviewing (2010) (0)
- The Politics of Population (Book) (2002) (0)
- Chapter 2. Narratives of Mad Despair Accumulate as Information, 1818‐1845 (2018) (0)
- The Empire of Chance: Classical probabilities, 1660–1840 (1989) (0)
- CHAPTER NINE. The Statistical Reformation (2010) (0)
- CHAPTER THREE. Apostle of Renunciation: A New Werther (2010) (0)
- Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914. By Timothy Alborn (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009), 440 pp. $80.00 (2010) (0)
- Chapter One. STATISTICS AS SOCIAL SCIENCE (2020) (0)
- Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures. Edited by Lorraine Daston.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. viii+398. $112.50 (cloth); $37.50 (paper and e-book). (2018) (0)
- The implications of chance (1989) (0)
- Martin S. Staum. Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond. (2013) (0)
- Book Reviews: Control and the therapeutic trial: rhetoric and experimentation in Britain, 1918–1948 (2010) (0)
- Is Science Made by Communities? (2020) (0)
- Natural Science and Social Theory (2020) (0)
- Book Review:Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Philip Mirowski (1995) (0)
- Economic Measurement and the Values of Science (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER EIGHT. Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines (2020) (0)
- A Life Devoted to Quantitative Reason (2010) (0)
- Bruce Mazlish (1923–2016) (2017) (0)
- Book Review:Histoire du calcul economique en France Francois Etner (1990) (0)
- Jason D. Hansen. Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914. (2017) (0)
- Charles Coulston Gillispie (1918–2015) (2016) (0)
- Philippe LeGall, A History of Econometrics in France: From Nature to Models (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. xx, 296, $120. ISBN 0-415-32255-3. (2008) (0)
- Book Review:Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators, and Professionals Roy MacLeod (1989) (0)
- Chapter Two. THE LAWS THAT GOVERN CHAOS (2020) (0)
- In Whose Name? Eugenicists and Geneticists (2014) (0)
- In loving memory of Lindon Barrett, 1961–2008 (2008) (0)
- Chapter 4. The Census of Insanity Tests Its Status as a Disease of Civilization, 1807‐1851 (2018) (0)
- Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 (review) (2010) (0)
- CHAPTER TWO. Lehrjahre of a Poetic Wrangler (2010) (0)
- W. F. Bynum;, Roy Porter (Editors).Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations. xvi + 736 pp., index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. $50 (cloth). (2006) (0)
- Power: The Modern Political Role of Social (2016) (0)
- CHAPTER NINE. Is Science Made by Communities? (2020) (0)
- Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life by Tamara Plakins Thornton (review) (2017) (0)
- Introduction: Scrutinizing the Data World (2018) (0)
- Nicholas Wright Gillham.A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. 416 pp., illus., figs., notes, bibl., index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. $30 (cloth). (2002) (0)
- The Political Philosophy of Quantification (2020) (0)
- Chance and life: controversies in modern biology (1989) (0)
- Book Review:Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge Deborah G. Mayo (1998) (0)
- CHAPTER THREE. Economic Measurement and the Values of Science (1996) (0)
- REJOINDER: Objectivity and Trust: A Measured Rejoinder (2003) (0)
- Chapter 5. French Alienists Call Heredity Too Deep for Statistics While German Ones Build a Database, 1844‐1866 (2018) (0)
- CHAPTER SIX. Intellectual Love and the Woman Question (2010) (0)
- Five ways to ensure that models serve society: a manifesto (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER FOUR. Pearson’s Progress: A Nineteenth-Century Passion Play (2010) (0)
- Book Review:The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain Roger Cooter (1986) (0)
- Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines (2020) (0)
- Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge . By J. Adam Tooze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 314. $60.00. (2002) (0)
- THE SOCIAL CALCULUS (2020) (0)
- Preface to the New Edition (2020) (0)
- Modern facts and postmodern interpretations. [Review of: Poovey, M. A history of the modern fact: problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society, 1998]. (2001) (0)
- Irrenärzte aller Länder! Tabular Unity and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Comprehend Insanity (2012) (0)
- THE SUPREME LAW OF UNREASON (2020) (0)
- The fetishization of quantification (2018) (0)
- Andre Wakefield.The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice. x + 226 pp., illus., tables, bibl., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. $45 (cloth). (2010) (0)
- Social Law and Natural Science (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER FOUR. The Political Philosophy of Quantification (2020) (0)
- U.S. Army Engineers and the Rise of Cost-Benefit Analysis (2020) (0)
- CHAPTER SEVEN. U.S. Army Engineers and the Rise of Cost-Benefit Analysis (1996) (0)
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