William Deringer

William Deringer is a historian and STS scholar who studies how numbers and calculations organize political and economic life. He is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (2018) reveals how numerical “facts and figures” became an authoritative form of public reasoning in Britain after 1688. Calculated Values was awarded the Oscar Kenshur Prize (Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies) and the Joseph J. Spengler Prize (History of Economics Society). His current project, The Formula That Rules Our Future: A Social History of Discounting, is a multi-century history of one calculation that would come to dominate how the future is valued across myriad domains, from finance and engineering to public administration and climate policy. An article from that project, “Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside” (Journal of Modern History, 2024), won the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. In 2026-27 he will be a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. As a NAFFLE Fellow, he is interested in how humanistic scholarship and liberal education can foster civic responsibility within technical domains like finance and engineering.