I have three major book projects:
I am currently working on a history of statistics in medicine, tentatively titled Number Doctors: The Emergence of Biostatistics and the Reformation of Modern Medicine. The project centers on a group of biostatisticians at the National Institutes of Health and their efforts to transform measures of causality and proof in medicine through the development of novel statistical measures from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is, in a sense, the prehistory of our current moment of “risky medicine” and “precision medicine,” as well as of algorithms and artificial intelligence in medicine. In this project I ask how and why medicine became a science of numbers. From 2022-2025, this project was supported by a NIH/National Library of Medicine G13 grant. In 2020-2021, I conducted research for the project as a National Library of Medicine Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine and at the American Philosophical Society as a Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Fellow.
My previous book, Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball, appeared in March 2019 with Princeton University Press. Written as an academic “cross-over,” the book traces the history of professional baseball scorers and scouts—of those who keep and analyze statistics and those who watch bodies and assess their worth. In baseball, as in many other venues, proponents of data analysis propose to replace expensive, messy, traditional forms of human expertise with cheaper, automated technologies. This book uses the history of baseball to show that even as the human sciences are increasingly becoming data sciences, the data sciences remain inescapably human sciences. Scouts, as well as scorers, communicated through numbers, just as both relied upon expert judgment, human labor, and bureaucratic institutions. Stark divisions between subjective and objective modes, between intuition and measurement, between different forms of expertise, seem inappropriate when we look at how scouts and scorers acquired knowledge. By revealing the infrastructure supporting scouting and scoring data—by tracing how we know what we know about baseball—I reveal the labor and technology that enable facts to seem stable and credible. It is a story about baseball, and about those who have devoted their lives to evaluating players’ worth, but it is ultimately a history of shifting conceptions of reliable knowledge in modern America.
My first book, The New Math: A Political History, was published in 2015 by University of Chicago Press. The “new math” curriculum was a federally funded effort over the 1950s and 1960s to fundamentally change the way math was taught to Americans. It was never “just” another curriculum reform, however. Promoters claimed it cultivated a new way to think, meant to inculcate the sort of citizen “modern” society required. Forged in the crucible of Cold War fears of intellectual inadequacy, deployed in the heyday of the Great Society, and criticized by proponents of the conservative turn back to tradition and austerity in the seventies, mid-century American political shifts were inscribed onto the rise and fall of the “new math.” The book argues that because people assumed mathematics was the discipline for disciplining the mind, debates about how math should be learned entailed commitments to conceptions of reasoning and of an educated citizenry more generally.
Books
(Princeton University Press, 2019 and 2021)
Awards:
Selected Reviews:
(University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Selected Reviews:
Nature, Science, Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Isis, History of Education Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics (American Political Science Association), Pacific Standard, Mathematical Intelligencer, Mathematics Teacher, Mathematical Association of America Reviews, Reviews in American History
Academic Articles and Chapters
2026. “Precision Matters: A.I. and the Triumph of Strategic Ambiguity,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 48/2 (April-June 2026): 31-47 [with Alison Langmead].
2026. “The History of Statistics in Statistically Valid Regulation,” British Journal for the History of Science: Themes [Online first]
2026 “Abraham Wald and the Origins of the Sequential Probability Ratio Test,” The American Statistician 80/1 (February): 177–183. [with Joel B. Greenhouse].
[2025] “Modeling the Epidemiologic Individual,” History of the Human Sciences [Online First, June 6, 2025]
2025: “Styles of Statistics,” Harvard Data Science Review 7(2)
2024: “Everyday Numeracy,” in vol. 6 of Bloomsbury Cultural History of Mathematics, eds David E. Rowe and Tom Archibald (London: Bloomsbury).
2023: “Inference Rituals: Algorithms and the History of Statistics,” Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000, ed. Morgan G. Ames and Massimo Mazzotti (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
2021: “The Curve,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 51/1 (February): 159-161.
2020: “Screening for Colorectal Cancer in the Age of Simulation Models: A Historical Lens,” Gastroenterology 159/4 (October): 1201-1204. [with Robert E. Schoen]
2020: “Precision Medicine and its Imprecise History,” Harvard Data Science Review 2(1).
2019: “Statistician,”in A Day in the Life of an American Worker: 200 Trades and Professions Through History, ed. Nancy Quam-Wickham and Ben Tyler Elliott (ABC-Clio).
2019: “The Bases of Data,” Harvard Data Science Review 1(2).
2019: “NIH Statisticians and the Transformation of Medical Proof,” Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, eds E. Thomas Ewing and Katherine Randall (Blacksburg: VT Publishing).
2017: “Knowing By Number: Learning Math for Thinking Well,” Endeavour 41/1 (March 2017): 8-11.
2016: “The Taste Machine: Sense, Subjectivity, and Statistics in the California Wine-World,” Social Studies of Science 46/3 (2016): 461-481.
2016: “Mathematical Superpowers: The Politics of Universality in a Divided World,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46/5 (2016): 549-555 [with Ksenia Tartarchenko]. Co-editor for this special issue on Cold War mathematics.
2015: “An Officer and a Scholar: West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard,” History of Education Quarterly 55 (Feb. 2015): 82-108.
2014: “The New Math and Midcentury American Politics,” Journal of American History 101 (Sept. 2014): 454-479.
2014: “In Accordance with a ‘More Majestic Order’: The New Math and the Nature of Mathematics at Mid-Century,” Isis 105 (Sept. 2014): 540-563.
2012: “Moneyball and Medicine,” The New England Journal of Medicine 367 (October 25, 2012) [with Jeremy A. Greene and Scott H. Podolsky].
2006: “Robert Woodhouse and the Evolution of Cambridge Mathematics,” History of Science 44 (2006): 1-25.
2005: “Augustus De Morgan and the Propagation of Moral Mathematics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005): 105-33.
Selected Essays, Commentaries and Reviews
2026: “MLB, ABS, and Losing the Human Element in Sport,” Pittsburgh Review of Books (May 22)
2026. “Historian’s Guide to Statistics,” Computational History (April 24)
2026. “Why Historians Need Statistical Thinking,” Computational History (March 16)
2021. “Behind the Numbers: Aggregated Risks in the Age of Covid,” LA Review of Books (May 12).
2021: “A.B. Hill’s 1962 Watson lecture: The statistical consultant as consensus maker,” Statistics in Medicine 40/1 (January 2021): 49-51.
2020: “Science Detractors and their Discontents,” Science 370/6523 (December 18, 2020): 1421. [review of Science Under Fire by Andrew Jewett]
2020: “Bradford Hill’s The Environment and Disease: Comment,” Observational Studies 6: 24-29 [with Joel Greenhouse].
2020: “Advanced analytics in healthcare: ready for primetime?” BMJ Quality and Safety Blog (April 19).
2019: “If Baseball is any Indication, the Big Data Revolution is Over,” The Washington Post Perspectives (July 9, 2019).
2019: “Much Ado About Method,” Science 364/6445 (June 14, 2019). [Review of How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why it Matters by John L. Rudolph]
2018: “Review of Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures,” Isis 109/2 (June): 435-436.
2018: “Review of Ruth A. Miller, Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards,” American Historical Review 124/4 (October): 1288-89.
2017: “Fun and Games,” Science 358/6359 (October 6, 2017). [Review of Game Changers: Stories of the Revolutionary Minds Behind Game Theory by Rudolf Taschner]
2017: “Risky Medicine: How Good Health Became Big Business,” Boston Review (June 5, 2017). [Review of Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty by Robert Aronowitz]
2016: “Quantifying Culture,” Science 354/6308 (October 7, 2016), p. 45. [Review of Living by Numbers: In Defense of Quantity by Steven Connor]
2016: “Facts Versus Fallacy,” Science 353/6299 (August 5, 2016), p. 550. [Review of Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist by Harold Wainer]
2015: “The Politics of Math Education,” The New York Times (December 3, 2015), p. A35.
2015: “Keeping Score: Accounting for America’s Pastime,” Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture 56 (Winter 2014-2015), 73-79.
2015: “The New Math Strikes Back,” Time.com, February 11, 2015.