Theodore Mark Porter (born December 3, 1953) is a historian of science emeritus in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for his histories of statistical thinking and quantification, particularly the sociology of quantification.
Porter was born Theodore Mark Porter on December 3, 1953. He grew up in the state of Washington, in rural areas of Puget Sound. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. His thesis was titled "The Calculus of Liberalism: The Development of Statistical Thinking in the Social and Natural Sciences of the Nineteenth Century" and it became the basis for his first book, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900.
He spent the years 1981âÂÂ1984 as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow. During that time, in 1982âÂÂ1983, he participated in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld program "The Probabilistic Revolution" organized by Lorenz Krüger, Ian Hacking, and Nancy Cartwright, where he developed several lasting professional projects and friendships, for instance with Lorraine Daston, Stephen Stigler, and M. Norton Wise.
Porter became a professor of history at the University of Virginia in 1984 and remained there until 1991, when he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles. There, he rose to the rank of distinguished professor, which he held until his retirement emeritus in 2023. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989.
He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 and ', the latter a vast reference for sociology of quantification. Trust in Numbers won Porter the Ludwik Fleck Prize for 1997. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity, which won the History of Science Society's 2018 Pfizer Award.
In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, he received the George Sarton Medal for lifetime achievement from the History of Science Society. In 2023, on his retirement, he was presented with the ebook festschrift Ted's Numbers, edited by M. Norton Wise, Mary S. Morgan, , Lorraine Daston, and Soraya de Chadarevian.