Institute for Advanced Study

Today

Robbert Dijkgraaf on Education, Imagination, and the Arts

August 27, 2018

“Our whole education is a process of confrontation between our imagination and the reality of established facts,” says Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf. “I think the greatest scientists have such an intense curiosity that they’re not discouraged by the current practice of the field and they push the boundaries of knowledge.”

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.”

Ideas

The Geometry of Random Spaces

By Matthew Kahle

I sometimes like to think about what it might be like inside a black hole. What does that even mean? Is it really “like” anything inside a black hole? Nature keeps us from ever knowing. But mathematics and physics make some predictions.

Ideas

What Do Judges Do?

By William Bentley MacLeod

The enormous power of the Supreme Court raises questions about what judges do, and how they reach such momentous decisions.

Video

The Cool Alter-Ego of a Black Hole

By Juan Maldacena and Douglas Stanford

If entangled codebooks are a resource, what type of resource is a pair of entangled black holes? And can these be used to power quantum teleportation?

Video

How Is Topology Applicable to the Real World?

The only major branch of modern mathematics that wasn’t anticipated by the ancient mathematicians, topology has been regarded as strictly abstract mathematics throughout most of its history. However, illustrating Wigner’s principle of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” topology is now beginning to come up in our understanding of many different real-world phenomena.

Video

Akshay Venkatesh, 2018 Fields Medalist

"A lot of the time when you do math, you're stuck. But at the same time, there are all these moments where you feel privileged that you get to work with it. And you have this sensation of transcendence. You feel like you've been part of something really meaningful," says 2018 Fields Medalist and IAS Professor Akshay Venkatesh.

In the Media

America Is Sacrificing the Future

August 03, 2018

Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George F. Will observes in the Washington Post that The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by IAS founding Director Abraham Flexner and current Director Robbert Dijkgraaf “read in the right government places, might inoculate the nation against philistine utilitarianism.”

Video

On Deep Learning and Cognition

By Christopher Manning

In many fields, including computational linguistics, deep learning approaches have largely displaced earlier machine learning approaches, due to the superior performance they provide.

In the Media

America’s Never-Ending Culture War

August 30, 2018

Writing for the New York Times, IAS Member Michael Kazin recalls the civil strife surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, arguing that the cultural, social, and political divisions of that period have largely endured over the last 50 years.

Faculty and Members

Today it seems clear that, in order for geometric thinking to remain a source of new insights (in mathematics, physics, computer science . . .), geometry must continue to evolve.