Kick off Homecoming with a trip to the classroom! 

In the Game Day Lecture “How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms,” Matthew L. Jones will discuss how understanding where data has been and where it may be headed empowers us to shape its use with intention, guiding it toward outcomes that reflect our shared values and aspirations. 

Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History. He focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and an M.Phil. from Cambridge, after which he taught at Columbia for 23 years. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of “How Data Happened, a History of the Science, Politics and Power of Data, Statistics and Machine Learning from the 1800s to the Present” (W. W. Norton, 2023). He has published two books previously, “The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue” and “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage”(both with Chicago). He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and is currently a CIFAR fellow in the Future Flourishing project. 

Event inquiries: eventmgr@princeton.edu or 609.258.6421 

Go Tigers!