BY THE NUMBERS
The Victorian Quantification of Everything; or
From Zero to NINES in Under Two Centuries
October 1-3, 2010
University of Virginia
Registration is now open! Information about travel and accommodations for the conference has been posted, as well as a provisional program. Queries may be sent to Victorians.Institute@gmail.com.
Let us count the ways in which Victorians turned, and in mounting numbers too, towards arithmetizing, computing, serializing, tallying, ordinating, enumerating – in a word, quantifying – both what they knew and the media they told it by.
- chapter and verse: seriality up and down the scale
- “for the numbers came”: prosody, measure, quantity
- a tale of two tellers: recounting and accounting
- stats, lies, and actuaries
- whatever happened to numerology?
- census and consensus
- standardization and quantification
- visual display of numerical data
- higher mathematics in the 19th century: Babbage, Boole, and beyond
- the third R: numeracy in education
- poly-math fantasy: Flatland, Wonderland, and. . .
- ratio redux, or Pythagoras on Piccadilly, Leonardo in London, Victorian Vitruvius: proportion in Victorian music, art, and architecture
Papers on these and innumerable other aspects of the conference theme will be discussed in the warm collegiality of the Victorians Institute on what we suppose with moderate to high probability will prove a balmy Piedmont weekend at the University of Virginia.
