Ideas

Genetics is today engaged in practices of identity formation, in philanthropy and socioeconomic development projects, as corroborating evidence in civil litigation and historical debates, and elsewhere. 

“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.”

Like everyone who lives in a heavily policed neighborhood, I grew up with a keen sense of being watched. Family, friends, and neighbors—all of us caught up in a carceral web, in which other people’s safety and freedom are predicated on our containment.

Much of the theory of knots is best understood in the framework of 20th- and 21st-century developments in quantum physics. In other words, what really fascinates me are not the knots per se but the connections between the knots and quantum physics.

On researching the dynamics of race-making and the value of the Middle Ages to the work of racial justice

In hindsight, it is strange that the Rubik’s Cube ever became so popular considering how hard it is. 

A 2013 talk by past Long-term Member Sara Seager on her continuing search for expolanetary lifeforms.

When I arrived at the Institute, I thought I knew exactly what I would accomplish as a Member in the School of Historical Studies… However, through a chance encounter with a nineteenth-century musical artifact, my carefully crafted research schedule was completely derailed.

In 1916, social theorist Thorstein Veblen called for the post-war institution of “academic houses of refuge . . . where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work.” 

What would inconsistency of the first order arithmetic mean for mathematics? What we need are foundations which can be used to construct reliable proofs despite being inconsistent.

Politicians and other leaders have regularly framed the current global health crisis as a period of “wartime.” In this 2012 article, Mary Dudziak, Member (2007–08) in the School of Social Science, examines the meaning of “wartime,” investigating the temporal element in warfare and the ways war structures our conception of time.

View a video in which Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Islamic Intellectual History in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the vast, global, and indispensable Islamic manuscript tradition that is currently under immediate threat.

View a presentation on the history of the Institute by Director Robbert Dijkgraaf and remarks by Faculty from each of the four Schools: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Camillo De Lellis, Nathan Seiberg, and Alondra Nelson.