Download or read book By the Numbers written by Jessica Marie Otis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English numerical practices underwent a complex transformation with wide-ranging impacts on English society and modes of thought. At the beginning of the early modern period, English men and women believed that God had made humans universally numerate, although numbers were not central to their everyday lives. Over the next two centuries, rising literacy rates and the increasing availability of printed books revolutionized modes of arithmetical education, upended the balance between the multiple symbolic systems used to express popular numeracy, and contributed to a wider transformation in numbers as a technology of knowledge"--