This page lists completed projects: for ongoing research involving the history of biostatistics and statistics in medicine, please see Ongoing Projects
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
Selected Academic Journal Articles
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: “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 and Reviews
2021: “The Curve,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 51/1 (February): 159-161.
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: “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: “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.