Paul Dirac

In welcome remarks delivered to the 2025–26 class of IAS scholars, Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg reflected on the Institute’s role as "a special place" dedicated to discovery. He emphasized how the Institute's history, culture of solitude and community, and spirit of dialogue create an environment where scholars can push the boundaries of knowledge.

In the early evening of March 15, 1933, a group of London socialites gathered in a Westminster mansion to hear a special lecture on the latest developments in nuclear science. The talk was chaired by Winston Churchill. The speaker—Churchill’s friend...

"Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory” read the New York Times headline of May 4, 1935. The article continued:

Professor Albert Einstein will attack science’s important theory of quantum mechanics, a theory of which he was a sort of grandfather. He...

In the two years I spent at the Institute, 1957–59, I had the opportunity of meeting two of the founders of the quantum theory—Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac. In the case of Bohr, perhaps “meeting” overstates the case. He was a Mem­ber in the spring of...

It has been said that the goals of modern mathematics are recon­struction and development.1 The unifying conjectures between number theory and representation theory that Robert Langlands, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, articulated...

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Albert Einstein had already left the country. He was in the United States and in contact with the founders of his new academic home, the Institute for Advanced Study, which would open in fall...

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...

Graham Farmelo, frequent Visitor in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses how the Institute for Advanced Study supports his work on scientific biographies through facilitating cross-disciplinary conversations not only with scientists but also with experts from the humanities.