Counting: Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE PRIZE 2025

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