Rhetorics of Rigor

While historians of science rightly take the importance of quantification for granted, over the course of the modern period the sciences of mathematics and computation have generally become less focused on quantity. Numerical knowledge claims have continued to exert undeniable force in discourses framed by ‘modern science,’ but countervailing tendencies in the sciences of quantity itself have increasingly thrown the primacy of numbers into question, as abstract spaces, axiomatic systems, and algorithmic procedures have largely eclipsed numbers and equations in the work of many mathematicians and related researchers. This panel asks what it meant and what ends it served, within mathematics and without, to locate mathematical rigor separately from the numerical. Attending to steps taken over the past century and a half to decenter quantification, we seek to understand the ways mathematics has been seen as a source of non-quantitative rigor. What sort of argumentative resource is a mathematics without numbers?