Christopher Phillips

Professor and Department Head, History

Bio

Christopher Phillips's research and teaching focus on the history of science in modern America, particularly statistics and mathematics. Prof. Phillips is currently working on a history of statistics in medicine, centered on a group of biostatisticians and their efforts to transform measures of causality and proof in medicine. It is, in a sense, the prehistory of our current moment of "risky medicine" and "precision medicine," as well as of algorithms and artificial intelligence in medicine. This project investigates how and why clinical medicine became a science of numbers. Phillips’s first book, The New Math: A Political History (Chicago, 2015) examined the rise and fall of the controversial "new math" curriculum against the changing politics of mid-century America. He showed that far from being insulated from politics, the teaching of mathematics was framed as, and understood as, a fundamentally political enterprise. His second book, Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton, 2019), used the collection of data in professional baseball as a way of exploring the supposed distinction between objective, numbered knowledge and subjective, people knowledge. He argued that data of both kinds are neither abstract nor natural, but grounded in concrete technologies, and created only through the labor of many highly-trained individuals.

To read more about Christopher Phillips, please visit his personal website.

Education

Ph.D.: Harvard University, 2011

Publications

• “Precision Matters: A.I. and the Triumph of Strategic Ambiguity,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 48/2 (April-June 2026): 31-47 [with Alison Langmead].

• “The History of Statistics in Statistically Valid Regulation,” British Journal for the History of Science: Themes (2026)

  “Abraham Wald and the Origins of the Sequential Probability Ratio Test,” The American Statistician 80/1 (February 2026): 177–183.  [with Joel B. Greenhouse].

• “Modeling the Epidemiologic Individual,” History of the Human Sciences  [Online First, June 6, 2025]
• “Styles of Statistics,” Harvard Data Science Review 7(2) [2025]
• “Precision Medicine and its Imprecise History,” Harvard Data Science Review 2(1) [2020]
• Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019)
• "The Taste Machine: Sense, Subjectivity, and Statistics in the California Wine-World," Social Studies of Science 46/3 (2016): 461-481.
• The New Math: A Political History (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
• "An Officer and a Scholar: West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard," History of Education Quarterly 55 (Feb. 2015): 82-108.

Courses Taught

• Introduction to the History of Science
• Medicine and Society
• Moneyball Nation: Data in American Life

 

Department Member Since: 2015