Ideas

The University of Washington Press has published Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights by Jonathan Israel in June 2021:

“In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but...

David Lang speaks about the pandemic's influence on music, composition, and live arts performances in an interview with Distinguished Journalism Fellow Joanne Lipman.

[In high school] I remember the book by George Gamow, One, Two, Three, Infinity. I think that was my first mathematical achievement, to understand the differences in the kinds of infinities there are. I really liked that satisfaction of understanding why there was more than one kind of infinity. — Distinguished Visiting Professor Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the prestigious Abel prize

In mathematics, there are many surprising parallels between problems in the theory of numbers and questions in three-dimensional geometry. Akshay Venkatesh explains some of this story, and how it continues to inform research. 

Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, a Member in the School of Social Science, studies violent and non-violent movements for political transformation, focusing on Africa and South Asia. Previously his work has focused on governance by armed groups and the...

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.

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.

Historian Jérémie Foa offers a very unique view of the 1572 massacres in his work entitled Tous ceux qui tombent: visages du massacre de la Saint–Barthélemy [All that fall: faces of the St. Bartholomew's day massacre]. He exhumes the “small lives” that were taken by reconstituting history in minute detail and honoring the names of the anonymous victims.

Sanjeev Arora, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, specializes in the theory of deep learning, with an interest in natural language processing and privacy. He speaks with IAS's Joanne Lipman about why deep learning is a “black box,” and navigating ethical issues of bias and privacy.

Hanging on the walls of Simons Hall are four late antique mosaics. Their migration from the floors of private houses in a Near Eastern city under Roman rule to a research institute in North America is a story of affluence, oblivion, and rediscovery.