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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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.
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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.
