Christopher Phillips

Professor and Department Head, History

Bio

Christopher Phillips's research and teaching focus on the history of science in modern America, particularly statistics and mathematics. Prof. Phillips is currently working on a history of statistics in medicine, centered on a group of biostatisticians at the National Institutes of Health and their efforts to transform measures of causality and proof in medicine. It is, in a sense, the prehistory of our current moment of "risky medicine" and "precision medicine," as well as of algorithms and artificial intelligence in medicine. This project investigates how and why medicine became a science of numbers. Phillips’s first book, The New Math: A Political History (Chicago, 2015) examined the rise and fall of the controversial "new math" curriculum against the changing politics of mid-century America. He showed that far from being insulated from politics, the teaching of mathematics was framed as, and understood as, a fundamentally political enterprise. His second book, Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton, 2019), used the collection of data in professional baseball as a way of exploring the supposed distinction between objective, numbered knowledge and subjective, people knowledge. He argued that data of both kinds are neither abstract nor natural, but grounded in concrete technologies, and created only through the labor of many highly-trained individuals.

To read more about Christopher Phillips, please visit his personal website.

Education

Ph.D.: Harvard University, 2011

Publications

• “Everyday Numeracy,” in vol. 6 of Bloomsbury Cultural History of Mathematics, eds David E. Rowe and Tom Archibald (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

• “Inference Rituals: Algorithms and the History of Statistics,” Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000, eds Morgan G. Ames and Massimo Mazzotti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

• For courses taught, change title of second one to “Introduction to the History of Science” and delete “Thinking with Evidence” as well as “History of Education in America”

• “Precision Medicine and its Imprecise History,” Harvard Data Science Review 2(1) [2020].
• “NIH Statisticians and the Transformation of Medical Proof,” Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, eds E. Thomas Ewing and Katherine Randall (VT Publishing, 2019).
• Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019)
• "The Taste Machine: Sense, Subjectivity, and Statistics in the California Wine-World," Social Studies of Science 46/3 (2016): 461-481.
• The New Math: A Political History (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• "An Officer and a Scholar: West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard," History of Education Quarterly 55 (Feb. 2015): 82-108.

Courses Taught

• Introduction to the History of Science
• Medicine and Society
• Moneyball Nation: Data in American Life

 

Department Member Since: 2015