How involved is Mathematics and Statistics in the field of history?

by neoliberal_buzzkill

Some of my professors don't have any math skills beyond their general ed requirements in undergrad, while others have taken courses like econometrics when they did grad school. From your perspective, how much of the work in history involves maths or stats?

restricteddata

There are very few historians who engage with mathematics or statistics in their historical practice. "Very few" is not "zero" — there are historians, and have been for many decades, who use statistical methods to analyze texts, data about the past, economic information, etc. There are also more recent "computational historians" who seek to find historical narratives in Big Data. And there are historians of science who seek to understand the internal workings of scientific work, and that often requires a fairly deep understanding of the mathematics involved, which is a different sort of engagement with math (looking at historical mathematics, not applying math to history).

But these are all fairly niche approaches to history relative to the whole profession in my experience. The dominant trends in history for many decades have been a suspicion of quantitative methods of analyzing the past, both because such methods only allow themselves to be applied to a tiny subset of historical information (i.e. structured data, which any historian will tell you is only a smidgen of human experience), and because the disciplines that pursue such views of the past (notably economists) often end up demonstrating the errors of such an approach (numbers can be bent to support many different ideas, and economists often miss out on much of what historians think is important). I think of myself as fairly open-minded about such things (I don't use quantitative methods, but I do digital tool development and so get wrapped up in lots of discussions and meetings with the computational historians), but I will say that in general there have not been any real huge historical breakthroughs or theses that relied upon such methods, or could not have arguably been made without such methods. Obviously this is a self-fulfilling prophecy (if people aren't using them much, they won't be used much).

I have been party to conferences in the field of international relations, a subfield of political science, where deep and long debates about qualitative vs. quantitative methods have taken place (the field is roughly split between the two approaches). I admit that looking at "how the sausage is made" has not made me think that quantitative methods will really get us better history, though I can see a place for some people doing investigations of that as a sort of augmentation to more traditional forms of historical practice.