At Pure Visibility, we love numbers of all sizes. We love putting them together and making sense of them and telling stories about numbers.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading The Triumph of Numbers by I.B. Cohen. His book describes how numbers began to be used for making government policies, understanding nature, and understanding people.

Most of the book deals with the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In this time period, European governments began to increasingly rely on statistics about their citizens to make decisions. At the same time, science underwent a revolution. With the introduction of numbers, scientific theories could make predictions and could be disproven through experimentation.

Cohen writes about how numbers come to describe not just natural phenomena in physics and biology, but also the actions of groups of people. Further, probability could be used to predict human activities.

A big part of our work here at Pure Visibility is looking at numbers to draw insights about what people are doing on websites. As such, this book didn’t so much change my mind about anything as provide a broader perspective on an important topic.