Expertise

Topics:  Historical Studies, Research, Science and Technology Policy, Applied Statistics, Mathematics and Numeracy Curriculum and Pedagogy, History and Philosophy of Specific Fields

Industries: Education/Learning

An historian of science and of twentieth-century America, Christopher Phillips' research focuses on the history of science, particularly statistics and mathematics. He has examined the rise and fall of the controversial "new math" curriculum against the changing politics of mid-century America and showed that far from being insulated from politics, the teaching of mathematics was framed as, and understood as, a fundamentally political enterprise. He has looked at the collection of data in professional baseball as a way of exploring the supposed distinction between objective, numbered knowledge and subjective, people knowledge. Phillips is currently working on a history of statistics in medicine.

Media Experience

Drinks With The Deal: Author Christopher Phillips  — The Deal
Christopher Phillips takes Lewis’ opposition between scouts and statheads as the starting point for his book “Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball,” which the Carnegie Mellon University history professor discussed on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast. Like Lewis, Phillips used baseball as a way of examining how organizations create and use data.

If baseball is any indication, the big data revolution is over | Opinion  — The Washington Post
The big data revolution may soon be over. Companies and governments will still continue to collect data, of course, and computing power will continue to grow. But vastly larger sets of data, even if collected more quickly and effectively, won’t answer all our questions or solve our problems as they …

What Market Research Can Learn from Baseball  — Scientific American
I thought about this question as I read a new book by Christopher J. Phillips entitled Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019). Phillips, an assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, distinguishes between scorers, who calculate things such as WAR (wins above replacement), and scouts, who observe attributes such as athleticism and determine if a player “has what it takes.”

Opinion | The Politics of Math Education  — The New York Times
American children have been bad at math for well over a century now. As early as 1895, educational reformers lamented Americans’ “meager results” in the subject. Over the years, critics of math education in this country have cycled through a set of familiar culprits, blaming inadequate teacher training, lackluster student motivation and faulty curricular design. Today’s debates over the Common Core mathematical standards are just the latest iteration of this dispute. Although these issues are important — no reform can ever succeed without considering teacher training and textbook design — resolving them will never make the underlying question of how to teach math “go away.”