A historian of technology and a medieval specialist, Lynn White was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University. He earned advanced degrees at Union Theological Seminary and Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in European medieval and Renaissance history. In 1934 White began his distinguished teaching career, first at Princeton Uni__versity, then at Stanford University and Mills College, where he also served as president from 1943 to 1958. Appointed professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958, he taught there until he retired in 1972. Among his numerous academic honors, White served as president of the History of Science… Society, the Society for the History of Technology, and the American Historical Association. White's research and writing emphasized the thrust of technology in the transformation of Western culture from its medieval religious impulse to its increasingly secular Renaissance concerns. In his classic study, Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (1969), he explored the spiritual foundations of technological innovation in Western Europe.