This book is written for the love of numbers. It tells their story, shows how they were invented and used to quantify our world, and explains what quantitative data mean for our lives. It aspires to contribute to overall numeracy through a tour de force presentation of the production, use, and evolution of data.Understanding our physical world, our economies, and our societies through quantification has been a persistent feature of human evolution. This book starts with a narrative on why and how our ancestors were driven to the invention of number, which is then traced to the eventual arrival at our number system.This is followed by a discussion of how numbers were used for counting, how they enabled the measurement of physical quantities, and how they led to the estimation of man-made and abstract notions in the socio-economic domain. As data don’t fall like manna from the sky, a unique feature of this book is that it explains from a teacher’s perspective how they’re really conceived