This event scrutinized AI’s ontological infrastructure—math—and examine how statistics became instrumental for describing the social world.

Aubrey Clayton is a mathematician who teaches courses in the philosophy of probability and statistics at the Harvard Extension School, and the author of Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (2021). He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, and The Boston Globe.

Theodore Porter is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900; and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. His most recent book is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, he received the George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement from the History of Science Society.

Alma Steingart, an assistant professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, researches the interplay between American politics and mathematical rationalities. Professor Steingart’s current project, Accountable Democracy, examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted electoral politics in the United States in the twentieth century. It follows on her first book, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (2023). Steingart’s work has appeared in Social Studies of Science, Grey Room, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work is supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia.