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Additional articles from new and past issues of the Institute Letter will continue to be posted over time and as they become available.
1948–1950: Snapshots
By Cécile DeWitt-Morette
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Cécile DeWitt-Morette with (from left to right) Isadore Singer, Freeman Dyson, and Raoul Bott at the Institute in the 1950s |
In Brief
It all began with a cable from Oppenheimer that I received on March 10, 1948, in Trondheim, Norway: ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF BOHR AND HEITLER I AM GLAD TO OFFER YOU MEMBERSHIP SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1948 – 1949 WITH STIPEND OF $3500. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER.
I did not know that this was a great offer. I did not even know where Princeton was, but as a general rule, I would rather say “yes” than “no.” I was then on leave from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), having been awarded a Rask-Oersted Fellowship for the academic year 1947–48 at the Nordiska Institutet för Teoretisk Fysik in Copenhagen.
In retrospect, I think that in the days of the Marshall plan, Oppie was looking for a couple of European young postdocs who would benefit from a year at the Institute. Did I benefit? More than I could ever have imagined.
During my two-year stay, 1948–50, Bryce DeWitt, a postdoc at the Institute, 1949–50, asked me to marry him, and I conceived the Les Houches Summer School as my self-imposed condition for marrying a “foreigner.” Thanks to Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, I learned about functional integration and am still fascinated by it.
Paul Hodgson: The Art of Doubt
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Paul Hodgson, Director's Visitor |
Artist Paul Hodgson spent some time at the Institute as a Director’s Visitor last fall. He created the work he is pictured with at left (shown here in progress) in a studio on campus and gave the talk “Honest Doubt” to the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study (see video at http://video.ias.edu/hodgson-honest-doubt), excerpts of which follow.
- I started to use doubt as a subject in my work while I was an undergraduate student in the Fine Art Department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
- In works from this time, the elements that I chose were presented through the use of collage, monotype and screenprint, through the pouring of paint, and the smearing of paint, but rarely through the use of a “signature” mark with the aid of a brush; they are second and third hand, layered and fragmented.
- The various ways in which I have recorded elements on the surface of the canvas are joined together by one common factor: distrust in laying down a direct mark.
In Search of an Identity: European Discourses and Ancient Paradigms
By Angelos Chaniotis
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Figure 1. Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and the founder of Rome, escapes from Troy in this relief panel in the Sebasteion (a building dedicated to imperial cult) at Aphrodisias (mid-first century C.E.). |
“Who are you?” A simple question sometimes requires a complex answer. When a Homeric hero is asked who he is (e.g. Iliad 7.123 ff.), his answer consists of more than just his name; he provides a list of his ancestors. The history of his family is an essential constituent of his identity. When the city of Aphrodisias (in Asia Minor) decided to honor a prominent citizen with a public funeral (ca. 50 B.C.E.), the decree in his honor identified him in the following manner:
Hermogenes, son of Hephaistion, the so-called Theodotos, one of the first and most illustrious citizens, a man who has as his ancestors men among the greatest and among those who built together the community and have lived in virtue, love of glory, many promises of benefactions, and the most beautiful deeds for the fatherland; a man who has been himself good and virtuous, a lover of the fatherland, a constructor, a benefactor of the polis, and a savior . . .
The components of Hermogenes’ identity include his name and nickname (Theodotos = “the gift of the gods”), his social class, the history of his family, and his personal achievements.
We can define “identity” in an elementary manner as the answer to the questions “who and what are you?” Depending on the context in which the question is asked and who wants to know, the answer may vary and change over time.
It is hard to imagine contexts in which a modern-day citizen of a European country when confronted with these questions would give the answer: “I am a European.” And yet discussions about European identity abound, usually tacitly taking the existence of European identity, cultural rather than political, for granted. Studies of how identity was defined in other cultures invites us to critically reflect on modern discourses of European identity.
Identifying Novel Genes Associated with Autism
By Chang S. Chan, Suzanne Christen, and Asad Naqvi
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This plot of genetic data from an individual with autism shows a deletion in the gene NCAM2, one of four genes that researchers in the Simons Center for Systems Biology found to be associated with autism. |
Autism is a common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder affecting one in 180 children. It is characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted interests and repetitive behavior. Autism is a complex disease exhibiting strong genetic liability with a twenty-five-fold increased risk for individuals having affected first-degree relatives. Moreover, the concordance for developing autism is over 90 percent in identical twins, but only 5–10 percent for fraternal twins. Recent advances in genetics show that autism is associated with many diverse genes, with each gene accounting only for a few percent of cases, as well as complicated multigenic effects.
Researchers at the Simons Center for Systems Biology have been studying autism for the past two years. We have identified novel genes associated with autism. Our approach is to use single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping chips that measure differences between individuals and can uncover candidate genes or regulatory elements (which control gene activity) associated with the disease.
Most individuals differ very little from one another across the human genome. SNPs are the largest class of DNA sequence variation among individuals. A SNP occurs when one base out of the four bases used in DNA is exchanged for another base at the same locus, such that the minor allele frequency is at least 1 percent in a given population. SNPs are found at the rate of roughly one out of every 1,000 base pairs of the human genome. These SNPs provide the best chance of detecting genetic variation, both normal and otherwise, between people.
Matter for Debate: A Workshop on Relics and Related Devotional Objects
By Caroline Walker Bynum
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Medieval reliquaries such as this one from a church in Cologne were among the devotional objects examined in the conference “Matter for Debate.” The conference was made possible with support from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. |
Material objects play a role in all religions. Jewish women light candles for the Sabbath; Christians sprinkle or douse bodies with water to baptize; Hindus offer coconuts and clarified butter to images of the gods and goddesses; the ancient Incas preserved mummies of their ancestors in caves, and Quechua-speaking peoples in the Andes still feel uneasy about these remains. Such objects—coconuts and images, candles and mummies—carry with them a community’s past, making it present and at the same time underlining its location in the past. They convey holiness from place to place, focus prayer and meditation, enforce or undermine hierarchy. But religions do not all venerate or fear the same objects or use them in the same ways. Over the past hundred years, historians of religion have been particularly interested in a subset of devotional objects that have been designated by worshippers with a word that can be translated as “relics” or “remains”: holy bodies or parts of bodies, or physical objects that have been in contact with them or their burial sites. Given this definition, relics are not found in all religions. Jews, for example, do sometimes venerate gravesites (although rabbis have been very dubious about this practice) but they do not revere dead bodies as holy. Hindus return the ashes of the dead to the Ganges rather than preserving them, but Buddhists build monumental containers or stupas for the ashes of the Buddha, and these stupas are considered so powerful that even their shadows convey healing or harm. Moreover, traditions vary over both space and time in how far such objects are crucial. Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century rejected the relic cult of Catholic Christians as superstition or idolatry. So it might seem as if it would be an interesting exercise in comparative religion to explore why some religions have relic cult and some do not. That is what Julia M. H. Smith of the University of Glasgow (see article, page 5) and I thought we were setting out to explore when we began to plan a workshop titled “Matter for Debate: Relics and Related Devotional Objects,” to be held at the Institute in July 2010. But the topic ended up being far more amorphous and far more challenging than that.