Alain Desrosières

Alain Desrosières was a statistician, sociologist and historian of science in France, known for his work in the history of statistics. He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning , published in 1993, translated into several languages, including English in 1998, and subsequently reviewed in the London Review of Books in 2000. This described the origins of statistics as technical machinery for administration in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the attempts to measure human and economic development. The text is an account of the statistics and their use in abstracting features of society to better measure and understand them, with particular aims.