Institute for Advanced Study

Today

10:30am
Zotero Training
11:00am
Princeton University Star Formation/ISM Rendezvous (SFIR)
1:00pm
Drexel University Physics Colloquium - 22nd Kaczmarczik Lecture
1:00pm
Crisis and Critique Seminar
1:30pm
Symplectic Dynamics Working Group
1:45pm
Physics Group Meeting
2:00pm
Informal Group Action Seminar
2:30pm
Princeton University Princeton Gravity Initiative Seminar
3:30pm
Fitness Center Training
4:00pm
NES Seminar
4:00pm
University of Pennsylvania Physics & Astronomy David Rittenhouse Lecture
6:00pm
Mathematical Conversations

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Ideas

The Persistence of Gender Inequality

By Joan Wallach Scott

Why—despite decades (indeed centuries)—of social protest, policy initiatives, educational reform, nongovernmental organization activity, national and international legislation—does gender inequality persist? 

Ideas

Founders’ Statement on America and Higher Learning

“We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.”

Video

Joan Breton Connelly

The Parthenon Sculptures: Decoding Images of Ancient Myths

By Joan Breton Connelly

The Parthenon sculptures conveyed genealogical myths that answered for the Athenians the most basic human questions. The cosmic and epic narratives, and the great boundary catastrophes of war and deluge, established frameworks for understanding the distant past. 

Video

Cedric Villani

On Particles, Stars, and Eternity

By Cédric Villani

Can one predict future arrangements of planets over extremely large time periods? Cédric Villani explores the long time behavior of a plasma and the long-term stability for incompressible fluids. 

Ideas

How Our Brains Operate

By John J. Hopfield

Tornadoes are a high-level description of the motions of enormous numbers of interacting molecules. We want to understand how mind emerges from brain, just as we understand how tornadoes emerge from molecules.

Ideas

A Conversation with Juan Maldacena

In the last six months, Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, has received three major awards: the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; the 2018 Einstein Medal from the Albert Einstein Society in Bern; and most recently the Richard E. Prange Prize and Lectureship in Condensed Matter Theory and Related Areas. The following is an edited Q&A with the Institute Letter.

Ideas

A World of Emotions: The Making of an Exhibition

By Angelos Chaniotis

What are the means through which ancient artists represented the emotions of gods, mythical heroes, and “real” people? How were images and texts exploited to arouse emotions in an ancient (and modern) audience?

Ideas

What Information Might the Topology of Locally Symmetric Spaces Contain?

By Akshay Venkatesh

Locally symmetric spaces are the home of the Langlands program—a set of overarching and interconnected conjectures connecting representation theory to number theory, first proposed in 1967 by Robert Langlands, now Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics. These spaces have become a crossroads for many different strands of mathematical thought.

Ideas

To “Write as I Paint My Pictures”: Paul Gauguin as Artist-Writer

By Linda Jane Goddard

Gauguin aligned the visual artist with the “primitive” and the writer with the ­“civilized” but was ambivalently suspended between the two.  Although skeptical of critics (he claimed that art needed no verbal commentary), Gauguin nonetheless wrote a good deal. 

Ideas

A Mathematical Rosetta Stone

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

It is difficult to convey the enormous impact of his revolutionary idea. Langlands showed how the same formula can originate from two entirely different worlds of thought. To employ another metaphor: it is as if two chefs cooking with two entirely different recipes, ingredients, and methods of preparation, produce exactly the same dish.

Faculty and Members

It was very hard to write a paper about it. I felt like someone who had discovered the meaning of life and couldn’t explain it to anybody else.

Edward Witten in Geometric Langlands, Khovanov Homology, String Theory

Produced by the communities who were at the heart of the events, Syriac sources compel us to reconsider what “conquests” means.

Muriel Debié in Syriac Sources and Sasanian and Arab-Muslim Occupation of the Middle East

Think of what it means that all black bodies are not equally evoked by this all-important symbol of racial oppression, the noose. What then are those who would ameliorate the conditions of black women in society to do?

Shatema Threadcraft in Spectacular Black Death

Emotions shaped Greek culture no less than reason. This is a simple and straightforward message. But, still, the story is full of tensions, contrasts, contradictions, and conflicts.

Angelos Chaniotis in A World of Emotions