Early life and education
Porter was born in 1953 and grew up in the state of Washington,in rural areas of Puget Sound. [1] He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. [2] His thesis was titled "The Calculus of Liberalism:The Development of Statistical Thinking in the Social and Natural Sciences of the Nineteenth Century" [2] and it became the basis for his first book,The Rise of Statistical Thinking,1820-1900. [3]
He spent the years 1981-1984 as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow. [2] During that time,in 1982–1983,he participated in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research,Bielefeld program "The Probabilistic Revolution" organized by Lorenz Krüger,Ian Hacking,and Nancy Cartwright,where he developed several lasting professional projects and friendships,for instance with Lorraine Daston, [4] Stephen Stigler, [5] and M. Norton Wise. [1]
Career
Porter became a professor of history at the University of Virginia in 1984 and remained there until 1991,when he moved to the University of California,Los Angeles. There,he rose to the rank of distinguished professor which he held until his retirement. [2] He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. [6]
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. [7] [8] Trust in Numbers won Porter the Ludwik Fleck Prize for 1997. [9] His most recent book,published by Princeton University Press in 2018,is Genetics in the Madhouse:The Unknown History of Human Heredity,which won the History of Science Society's 2018 Pfizer Award. [3]
In 2008,he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [10] [11] In 2023,he received the George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement from the History of Science Society. [3] In 2023,on his retirement,he was presented with the ebook festschrift Ted's Numbers,edited by M. Norton Wise,Mary S. Morgan,Emmanuel Didier [ fr ],Lorraine Daston,and Soraya de Chadarevian. [12]
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Cosimo II de' Medici was Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1609 until his death. He was the elder son of Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Christina of Lorraine.
Peter Louis Galison is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University.
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The George Sarton Medal is the most prestigious award given by the History of Science Society. It has been awarded annually since 1955. It is awarded to a historian of science from the international community who became distinguished for "a lifetime of scholarly achievement" in the field.
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Jan Ellen Goldstein is an American intellectual historian of Modern Europe. She is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and co-editor of the Journal of Modern History.
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Andrew T. Scull is a British-born sociologist who researches the social history of medicine and the history of psychiatry. He is a distinguished professor of sociology and science studies at University of California, San Diego, and recipient of the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contributions to the history of medicine. His books include Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, and Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.
Jenny Thomann-Koller was a Swiss gynecologist and pediatrician. She was Head of Internal Medicine at the Schweizerische Pflegerinnenschule mit Spital in Zürich. In her dissertation, Beitrag zur Erblichkeitsstatistik der Geisteskranken im Ct. Zürich. Vergleichung derselben mit der erblichen Belastung gesunder Menschen u. dergl., published in 1895, she introduced a control group which challenged the then-popular theory of degeneration and eugenics.
The sociologyof quantification is the investigation of quantification as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.
Ethics of quantification is the study of the ethical issues associated to different forms of visible or invisible forms of quantification. These could include algorithms, metrics/indicators, statistical and mathematical modelling, as noted in a review of various aspects of sociology of quantification.
The French movement of statactivism advocates for the mobilization of statistics in support to social movements and agendas.
The Politics of Large Numbers:A History of Statistical Reasoning is a book by French statistician, sociologist and historian of science, Alain Desrosières, which was originally published in French in 1993. The English translation, by Camille Naish, was published in 1998 by Harvard University Press.
The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, evidence and democracy is a multi-author book edited by sociologists Andrea Mennicken and Robert Salais and published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life is a book by Theodore Porter, published in 1995 by Princeton University Press, that proposes that quantification in public life is driven by bureaucratic necessities to obtain legitimacy through objectivity.
