Counting

Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers

By: Benjamin Wardhaugh

Narrated by: David Thorpe

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COUNT? WHY ARE HUMANS THE ONLY SPECIES ON EARTH THAT CAN DO IT? WHERE DID COUNTING COME FROM? HOW HAS IT SHAPED SOCIETIES ALONG THE WAY? AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Counting is an innovative, erudite, world-wrapping journey through humanity’s marvellous ability to impose numbers on things. Acclaimed historian and mathematician Benjamin Wardhaugh draws on stories from the Stone Age to cyberspace in pursuit of the elusive, fascinating, endlessly diverse history of human counting.

Starting with the roots of counting in human brains, bodies and environments, Wardhaugh tours us around the world and through time while exploring the different flavours of counting that have developed over millennia. We meet the makers of bead necklaces in ancient South Africa, the inventors of writing in the world ’ s first metropolis, and the ‘counter culture’ of classical Athens. We see counting used – and changed – by Indian scholars, Chinese peasants and Papuan shopkeepers; we meet the distinctive numerate agendas of Mayan kings, US governments and Korean vloggers.

Weaving these stories together, Wardhaugh shows how cultures have shaped counting, and how counting has shaped culture, in a rich tapestry spanning thousands of years. This is the vast story of human attempts to find some order in an unruly world; or, perhaps, to impose on a reluctant world the order that humans find within themselves. It is a history as wide, deep and tangled as that of humanity itself

©2024 Benjamin Wardhaugh (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

‘An astonishingly readable and informative history of the greatest mathematical bestseller of all time, from ancient Greece to dark energy. The writing is vivid and the stories are gripping. Highly recommended!’
Ian Stewart, author of Significant Figures

‘Benjamin Wardhaugh is an excellent storyteller and his collected short story approach to the history of The Elements works splendidly… simultaneously educational, entertaining and illuminating … A highly desirable read for all those, both professional and amateur, who interest themselves in the histories of mathematics, science and knowledge … over almost two and a half millennia’
Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus

Praise for Benjamin Wardhaugh’s Gunpowder and Geometry

‘Meticulous yet lively biography, even those who have never heard of its subject could hardly disagree’ Sunday Times

‘Wardhaugh graphically describes the conditions Hutton escaped from and the importance of Newcastle and its coal to the changes taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century . . . like something from the pages of a Jane Austen novel . . . Wardhaugh has done a good job of rescuing Hutton from obscurity and setting the man and his achievements in the context of their times . . . This account of how “the pit boy turned professor” became “one of the most revered British scientists of his day” is well worth reading’ Literary Review

‘As this book argues persuasively, he changed a whole culture: by simple dint of his genial celebrity as well as a europhile passion for developments in France and elsewhere, he helped to elevate mathematics to a rank equal with the other sciences. It is impossible not to warm to such a man in Wardhaugh’s wryly sympathetic telling . . . Spirited and elegantly erudite’ Daily Telegraph