As one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, the Institute for Advanced Study presents public lectures that may be of interest to the greater community. They include talks by Institute Faculty as well as special presentations, such as those from the Institute's 75th Anniversary, celebrated in 2005; A Program to Mark the Centenary Year of the Birth of Kurt Gödel, held in November 2006; and Remembering Clifford Geertz, a program honoring the late School of Social Science Faculty member, held on March 3, 2007.
You may access the most recent lectures by clicking on the appropriate link below. Previous lectures can be accessed by visiting our Video Archive.
Academic Year 2007-2008
| 2008 Leon Levy Foundation Member Lecture Alan B. Krueger, Leon Levy Foundation Member, School of Social Science |
| Solutions to Equations in Integers Peter Sarnak, Professor, School of Mathematics |
 | Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk Russell Oberlin, Countertenor |
| Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor, School of Social Science |
| Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk Terry Teachout, Music and Drama Critic, Commentary and The Wall Street Journal |
| Tracking Influenza Virus Epidemics over the Past Century: Can We Predict Next Year's Epidemic? |
| Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk Paul Moravec, Artist-in-Residence, Institute for Advanced Study |
| Space Tourist Charles Simonyi, Institute Trustee and President and CEO, Space flight is still a very rare and exotic experience which has only recently been opened to "tourists," officially known as spaceflight participants. Dr. Simonyi was the fifth of these as the 450th person in space. Under a contract with Space Adventures and the Russian Space Agency, he rode a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft into orbit to visit the International Space Station (ISS), and returned on another Soyuz, landing in central Kazakhstan after a 14-day stay in space. Parts of the Soyuz system date back to the beginning of the Space Age, which started on October 4, 1957 with the launch of Sputnik I. Dr. Simonyi describes the six month training process and the flight itself from the point of view of a knowledgeable civilian, with particular emphasis on the issues of system reliability, traditions, and health aspects. |
| The History of Others: Foreign Peoples in Early Chinese Historiography Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, School of Historical Studies This lecture will provide an overview of the production and characteristics of alien history in early China, while acknowledging and attempting to gauge the cultural influence of these accounts among the alien people themselves, as "consumers" of histories they did not produce, but were used politically and in other ways. These reflections may also serve as a first step towards a comparative discussion, across the historiographic traditions of literate civilizations, about the fundamental issues of who wrote alien histories, why, and for whom. |
| Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University
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Summer 2007
| 2+1-Dimensional Gravity Revisited July 26, 2007 Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor |
| Prospects in Theoretical Physics High Energy scattering at strong coupling via AdS/CFT July 25, 2007 Juan Maldacena, Professor |
| Prospects in Theoretical Physics Warped Conifolds and their Applications to Cosmology July 19, 2007 Igor Klebanov, Professor |
Academic Year 2006-2007
| Terrorism and Just War This lecture attempts to answer these questions: First, what is wrong with terrorism? The question may seem easy, but it is often answered badly. Second, how is terrorism chosen - picked out of all the possible political strategies? And third, how ought we to fight against terrorism? Or better, what are the moral limits that anti-terrorists ought to recognize? |
| Afghanistan and Iraq: Failed States or Failed Wars Lakhdar Brahimi, Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations
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| The Difficult Task of Erasing Oneself: Non-Composition in Twentieth-Century Art The lecture examines how, rather than always leading to the myth of the death of painting (or sculpture), as Alexandr Rodchenko had it, the idea that the artist should erase all traces of him- or herself was a dictum that helped sustain many different artistic practices during the past century, from Kasimir Malevich's Black Square of 1915, Jean Arp's collages "according to the laws of chance" of 1916-18, and Piet Mondrian's modular grids of 1918-19, to Pop Art, Minimalism, Process art, Conceptual art, and beyond. |
| The Mathematical Infinity Enrico Bombieri, IBM von Neumann Professor, School of Mathematics
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| Why Haven't Global Markets Reduced Inequality? Eric Maskin , Albert O. Hirschmann Professor, School of Social Science Proponents of free trade have argued that expanding global markets should reduce income inequality in poorer countries. So far, however, there is no compelling evidence that such a reduction has occurred. In this lecture, Professor Maskin outlines the theory on which the free traders' argument is based -- the theory of comparative advantage -- and proposes an alternative theory that seems more consistent with the evidence to date. |
| The World's Largest Experiment Nathan Seiberg, Professor, School of Natural Sciences This lecture discusses how the Large Hadron Collider is expected to provide further information about the standard model of particle physics, which describes the elementary particles and the forces acting between them. Among the potential discoveries the LHC may yield are new insights about the origin of mass, the physics of the early universe, new symmetries of nature and extra space dimensions. It will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of high energy physics. |
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