For many years I have been concerned with the process by which scientists turn arithmetic into understanding. The word “process” here is meant in at least four different senses at the same time – algebraic, logical, cognitive, social. These correspond to at least four different disciplines that have hitherto considered parts of the puzzle in isolation, and so my arguments will jump back and forth among these four ways of speaking. There seems to be no standard name for this nexus in the literature of any of the fields that touch on it, and in the 20 or so years that I've been watching closely, as far as I know no popular book or scholarly monograph has appeared that focuses on these topics at any level. That this book has materialized in your lap in some copyrighted form (codex, Kindle, netbook, whatever) is evidence that editors and reviewers believe the gap to have been worth filling.

Before I was trying to consider these issues all together, I was trying to think them through separately. Over 35 years as a professional statistician and biometrician I have been employed to transform arithmetic into understanding in five main areas of scientific application: first, craniofacial biology, then gross neuroanatomy (the National Institutes of Health's “Human Brain Project”), then image-based anatomy of the whole organism (NIH's “Visible Human Project”), and, most recently, physical anthropology and organismal theoretical biology Along the way there have been diversions: the science of fetal alcohol damage, analysis of war wounds to the heart, studies of hominid fossils.