Matthew Jones

Smith Family Professor of History

Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. In 2023, Norton published his How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, written with Chris Wiggins. He is completing a book, Great Exploitations on state surveillance of communications and information warfare. He has published two books previously, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage and The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (both with Chicago). The Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded his research and teaching.