Alain Desrosières (18 April 1940 – 15 February 2013) was a statistician, sociologist and historian of science in France, well known for his work in the history of statistics He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, published in 1993, translated into several languages, including English in 1998, and subsequently reviewed in the LRB in 2000. This described the origins of statistics as technical machinery for administration in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the attempts to measure human and economic development. The text is an account of the statistics and their use in abstracting features of society to better measure and understand them, with particular aims.
Born |
18 April 1940
|
Died |
15 February 2013 (aged 72)
|
Zodiac | Aries |
Tags | Add tag |