In Stephen Baker’s recently published The Numerati, the business journalist corrals all of the data-harvesters, quant-jocks, and super-crunchers – pet names for the fledgling breed of info-junkies currently tracking your digital footsteps – into a single, aspirant professional class with the vaguely innocuous but kicky job title of “entrepreneurial mathematician.” Baker’s premise is simple: 1) The world is engaged in a massive project of quantification. 2) The impulse to quantify avalanches of blank information is practically insti... Read more

In Stephen Baker’s recently published The Numerati, the business journalist corrals all of the data-harvesters, quant-jocks, and super-crunchers – pet names for the fledgling breed of info-junkies currently tracking your digital footsteps – into a single, aspirant professional class with the vaguely innocuous but kicky job title of “entrepreneurial mathematician.” Baker’s premise is simple: 1) The world is engaged in a massive project of quantification. 2) The impulse to quantify avalanches of blank information is practically instinctual. 3) The sheer mass of available information begs for its own analysis, rather than the specific qualities or attributes of that information.