He is a historian of science & the author of Masters of All They Surveyed. After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University, he was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity college, Cambridge. In 1999, Chicago's Newberry Library awarded him the Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. A 1999-2000 Fellow at the Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library, he has taught at Yale & Columbia Universities. He lives in Princeton, where he is an assistant professor in the History Department.