Enrico Bombieri

In November, out of the blue, I received a letter from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Nothing about the envelope suggested that the letter inside would be important. It was an ordinary white office envelope with Institute for...

In 2016, the Institute celebrated the work and impact of Jean Bourgain, IBM Von Neumann Professor in the School of Mathematics and member of the Faculty since 1994. Recipient of the Fields Medal and the Shaw Prize, among numerous other awards...

Does beauty exist in mathematics? The question concerns mathematical objects and their relations, the real subject of verifiable proofs. Mathematicians generally agree that beauty does exist in the structural beauty of theorems and proofs, even if...

A year ago in April, the editors of the Annals of Mathematics, a journal published by the Institute and Princeton University, received an email with a submission by an unknown mathematician. “Bounded Gaps Between Primes” by Yitang Zhang, an adjunct...

From the data, you have this remnant of a real object that you want to resurrect. Before you can start to do that, the first thing you need to know is, is it really coming from such and such an object? Are there some good tests or signatures for that?

More than seventy-five years ago, Founding Director Abraham Flexner sought to create with the Institute for Advanced Study a haven where “scholars and scientists may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory, without being carried off...

It is noteworthy that as between two proofs of a theorem mathematicians will prefer the one which, as they say, is more “elegant,” a term which has primarily an aesthetic rather than a logical significance. It is a striking fact that creative...

This 2007 lecture by Enrico Bombieri, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, explores how mathematics has arrived at its present pragmatic view of infinity and some of the counterintuitive paradoxes, as well as some of the positive results...