Ideas

As it turns out, the fastest, most efficient way to make a virtual world seem real is to simulate reality using the laws of physics.

Smart algorithms allow calculations that could have never been done even on the world’s fastest computer today.

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. 

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.

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

Meet Carissa Harris, Member in the School of Historical Studies, who is an Associate Professor at Temple University. In 2020–21, she is exploring how anger became feminized in the late medieval English popular imagination.

Meet Natalie Paquette, a mathematical physicist in the School of Natural Sciences. "I like to think about the many bright spots in my day when I feel that I finally learn or understand something properly, get a satisfying answer to a computation, or become excited about a new idea." 

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.

During my stay at the Institute, I studied little-known but amazing Old Babylonian tablets. These tablets show that the ancient scribes developed sophisticated tools for writing complex mathematical expressions and thought deeply about the nature of an equation.

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

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.

“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.”

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