Margaret C. Jacob (PhD, Cornell University) is distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on science, religion, the Enlightenment, freemasonry, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Her first book, "The Newtonians and the English Revolution" (1976), won the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her most recent monograph is "Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe "(2006). She is currently at work on a book about the first knowledge economy.