Rate My Professor Matthew Jones

Jones explores the social, political, and ethical contexts of data collection, surveillance, algorithms, quantitative reasoning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. He authored The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which examines virtue cultivation among key early modern scientists, and Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016), analyzing the material challenges in developing early calculating devices. In 2023, he co-authored How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (W.W. Norton & Company) with Chris Wiggins, based on their popular course; the book was named one of The New Yorker's best books of the year. Jones received a 2017-18 Data & Society Fellowship from the Data & Society Research Institute. At Princeton, he teaches The Scientific Revolution, Data & Culture (co-taught with Meredith Martin), and seminars on information, computing, and infrastructure. His scholarship illuminates the historical contingencies of technological systems and their societal impacts.