The Materiality of Numbers

This is a book about numbers – what they are as concepts and how and why they originate – as viewed through the material devices used to represent and manipulate them. Fingers, tallies, tokens, and written notations, invented in both ancestral and contemporary societies, explain what numbers are, why they are the way they are, and how we get them. Overmann is the first to explore how material devices contribute to numerical thinking, initially by helping us to visualize and manipulate the perceptual experience of quantity that we share with other species. She explores how and why numbers are conceptualized and then elaborated, as well as the central role that material objects play in both processes. Overmann's volume thus offers a view of numerical cognition that is based on an alternative set of assumptions about numbers, their material component, and the nature of the human mind and thinking.

• Provides an explanation of what numbers are and where they come from
• Shows how ancestral and contemporary societies invent and elaborate numbers by manipulating material objects like fingers, tallies, tokens, and written notations
• Illuminates an aspect of human thinking—the active role of material structures in cognition-that is largely ignored or misunderstood