Nick Seaver

Anthropologist, Tufts University



The Mathematics of Models and the Mathematics of Measure in Southern California
The journal Social Analysis published a new translation of an essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Mathematics of Man” (1956), and invited several commentaries. This piece, co-authored with Bill Maurer, responds to Lévi-Strauss’s call for non-quantifying mathematical work in the social sciences by recounting a period in the history of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, in which researchers and administrators sought to establish a properly mathematical anthropology.
December 2024