Kurt Gödel

"'It’s easy to cover a floor with copies of squares, triangles or hexagons [...] but only in ways that never repeat. 'You want to understand the structure of such tilings,' said Rachel Greenfeld, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 'How crazy can they get?' Pretty crazy, it turns out."

"In June, 1948, when I graduated from Princeton High School, I already had a job, as a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study, on the far side of town. All kinds of people assumed that the Institute was part of Princeton University, which it wasn’t and isn’t."

"The Institute for Advanced Study doesn’t have any students or classes. There’s no regular daily agenda full of meetings and conferences. The scholars here don’t even have to research any specific topic. They could spend their whole day walking the grounds or sitting by the lake."

There are scholars in the streets of the Institute for Advanced Study. These roads serve as an important reminder of the historic scholars that paved a way for the groundbreaking research that happens today on the Institute campus.

Discover the life and legacy of the twentieth century's foremost mathematical logician in Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, the new biography by Stephen Budiansky.

Billed as "the first major biography written for a general...

Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was named a recipient of the 2021 Abel Prize, which he shares jointly with László Lovász—a former IAS visiting professor—of Eötvös Loránd University. They are cited by the Abel Committee “for...

The Institute for Advanced Study, since its founding in 1930, has aspired to provide an unbiased environment for international scholars to pursue vital and groundbreaking work in the sciences and humanities. Its mission is to recruit the world’s most...

"Ultimately," Siobhan Roberts notes, "Gödel came to be compared not only to his friend Albert Einstein but also to Franz Kafka. Such was the nature of his contribution—only a handful of theorems, but all of them monumental and fantastical." A...