Description:
A collection of essays which deploy rhetorical lenses to explore how mathematics influences the values and beliefs with which we assess the world and make decisions, as well as how our values and beliefs influence the kinds of mathematical instruments we construct and accept.
Brief description: James Wynn is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, andPublic Engagement and Evolution by the Numbers: The Origins of Mathematical Argument in Biology.
Review Quotes:
"Arguing with Numbers is a major contribution to the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine and is full of important resources for teaching communication to math and engineering students. We can only hope, too, that it will become a foundational book, fostering the further growth of a rhetorical subfield investigating mathematics, related formal systems, and the disciplines that study them."
--Randy Allen Harris, editor of Rhetoric and Incommensurability