Benjamin Wardhaugh's "Counting"

Benjamin Wardhaugh lives in Oxford, UK, with his wife and children. He does research and writing based at the University of Oxford, where he is a former Fellow of All Souls College. Wardhaugh holds degrees in mathematics, music and history from Cambridge, London and Oxford. At Oxford, he has taught history to mathematics students and science to history students.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Counting: Humans, History and the Infinite Lives of Numbers, with the following results:

Open my book to page 99, and you’ll find yourself at the threshold of a new chapter—one devoted to the fascinating world of counters and counting-boards. As I note there: “The techniques of counters and counting boards dominated European experiences of counting and calculation from the fifth century BCE for more than two millennia, fading out as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth century.” The chapter’s title, “Counter culture from Athens to the Atlantic,” nods both to classic scholarship on ancient Greek numeracy and to the tactile, hands-on ways people once engaged with numbers: moving stones, beads, jetons, and other tokens across boards.

Page 99 is, admittedly, an awkward spot for this test: it’s the start of a chapter, not the heart of an argument or narrative. And since this is the chapter on Europe—one of seven, each covering a different region (Africa, the Middle East, Europe, India, East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas)—it might give a misleadingly Eurocentric impression of the book’s global scope. But I hope even this introductory page hints at the unexpected stories I’ve tried to gather.

If you read on, you’ll meet Philokleon, navigating a day at the law courts in classical Athens—a dense, complex world of life-and-death games with counters. You’ll encounter Blanche of Castile, the medieval Queen of France who invented new ways to use counters and counting boards to control her court and her country. And you’ll discover a surprising technique for counting to ten thousand on your ten fingers.

All together, I hope it offers a fun and surprising look at how counting—so often imagined as purely abstract—was for centuries a physical, almost playful encounter with the world.

Visit Benjamin Wardhaugh's website.

The Page 99 Test: Poor Robin's Prophesies.

--Marshal Zeringue