Theodore M. Porter

Theodore Mark Porter (born December 3, 1953) is a historian of science emeritus in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for his histories of statistical thinking and quantification, particularly the sociology of quantification.

Early life and education Porter was born Theodore Mark Porter on December 3, 1953. He grew up in the state of Washington, in rural areas of Puget Sound. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. His thesis was titled "The Calculus of Liberalism: The Development of Statistical Thinking in the Social and Natural Sciences of the Nineteenth Century"

He spent the years 1981–1984 as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Stephen Stigler, and M. Norton Wise.

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. Trust in Numbers won Porter the Ludwik Fleck Prize for 1997. 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. In 2023, he received the George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement from the History of Science Society.

Works

Authored books The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986)

with Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty, Lorenz Krüger: The Empire of Chance: How Probability and Statistics Changed Everyday Life (1989)

Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (1995)

Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004)

Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (2018)

Edited books

with Dorothy Ross: The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (2003)

with Tord Larsen, Michael Blim, Kalpana Ram, and Nigel Rapport: Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life (2021) (Ritual Studies Monograph Series)

Selected articles

“A Statistical Survey of Gases: Maxwell’s Social Physics.” (1981) Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12(1), pp. 77–116. “Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science.” (1992) Social Studies of Science, 22(4), pp. 633–51. "Statistical and Social Facts from Quetelet to Durkheim." (1995) Sociological Perspectives, 38(1), pp. 15–26. “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science.” (2006) Social Research, 73(4), pp. 1273–94. "Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit?" (2006) Isis, 97(2), pp. 314–321. “Thin Description: Surface and Depth in Science and Science Studies.” (2012) Osiris, 27(1), pp. 209–26. "Funny Numbers." (2013) Culture Unbound, 4(4), pp. 585–598.

Notes and references