Matthew L. Jones

Matthew L. Jones specializes in the history of science and technology, focused on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012-13 and a Mellon New Directions fellow in 2012-15. He is finishing two books, Great Exploitations: Data Mining, Legal Modernization, and the NSA and Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005, a study of "big data" and its growth as a new form of technical expertise in business and scientific research. Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage is appearing this fall from the University of Chicago Press. His first book The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2006) focused on the mathematical innovations of Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz.

Matthew Jones leads the Big Data and Science Studies Research Cluster and serves as an Advisory Committee Member.