Ideas | Institute for Advanced Study

Ideas

Explore firsthand accounts of research and questions posed by IAS scientists and scholars. From art history to string theory, from moral anthropology to the long-term fate of the universe, contributions span the last decade to the research of today.

Irving Lavin on the Institute for Advanced Study

Professor Irving Lavin (1927–2019) was an art historian distinguished by his conviction that the study of the history of art was the study of the history of ideas. One of the ideas he found most exciting was the idea, born in 1930, of the...

Video: Sir Michael Atiyah on Beauty and Truth in Mathematics

On November 8, 2010, Sir Michael Atiyah, Professor (1969–72) in the School of Mathematics, gave a seminar on "Beauty and Truth in Mathematics: A Tribute to Albert Einstein and...

The Prime Number Conspiracy

"Quantum Questions Inspire New Math," a column for Quanta Magazine by Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf, features in The Prime...

Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire

"To Solve the Biggest Mystery in Physics, Join Two Kinds of Law," a column for Quanta Magazine by Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert...

The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018

Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf’s “Quantum Questions Inspire New Math,” published by Quanta Magazine, has been selected for inclusion in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018 (Princeton University Press).

Edward Witten lectures at the podium

Natural Sciences

Qubit Workshop 2018 Videos

From December 4–5, 2018, the School of Natural Sciences hosted a workshop on "Quantum Information and the Structure of Spacetime." The event focused on quantum aspects of black holes, with an emphasis on applying ideas from quantum information...

Historical Studies

The Forgotten Director? Frank Aydelotte at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1939–1947

By Priscilla Roberts

When I spent the fall 2016 semester at the Institute, working on the impact of unofficial elite networks upon twentieth-century internationalism, I welcomed the opportunity to explore materials in the Institute's Shelby White and Leon Levy...

Historical Studies

Video: Jerusalem in Biblical Times

On November 9, 2018, Israel Finkelstein, Jacob Alkow Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze and Iron Ages at Tel Aviv University, gave a public lecture on "Jerusalem in Biblical Times: Comments on the Archaeology and History ca....

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

By Didier Fassin

Angelus Novus was painted by Paul Klee in 1920 using an oil transfer technique he had invented. It was purchased the following year by Walter Benjamin, who had it hung in the successive places where he lived and found in it an...

Historical Studies

Video: Genes, Patents, and Race

By Myles W. Jackson and Arnold J. Levine

On October 26, 2018, Myles W. Jackson, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, gave his first IAS public lecture on "Genes, Patents, and Race: The History of Science as a Bridge Between Disciplines."

...

The Persistence of Gender Inequality

By Joan Wallach Scott

Why—despite decades (indeed centuries) of social protest, policy initiatives, educational reform, nongovernmental organization activity, national and international legislation—does gender inequality persist?

Establishing a Theoretical Understanding of Machine Learning

"It's kind of like physics in its formative stages—Newton asking what makes the apple fall down," says Sanjeev Arora, Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, explaining the current scientific excitement about machine learning.

Natural Sciences

A Conversation with Juan Maldacena

The Institute Letter interviews Juan Maldacena on quantum information, spacetime, and efforts to understand how the view of black holes as a quantum computer is consistent and compatible with black holes from Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Mathematics and Computation

By Avi Wigderson

In stark contrast to the elegant, concise algorithmic gems, which were man-made, many new algorithms simply “create themselves,” with relatively little intervention from humans, mainly through interaction with massive data.

Historical Studies

Science and Culture: From Gene Patenting to Physics, Technology, and Public Policy

By Myles W. Jackson

My work in the history of science probes the porous boundaries between science and culture over the past two centuries. Much of it gestures toward the role of history in public policy. I am interested in having the historian at the table while a scientific controversy is ongoing. We historians are rather good at illustrating that controversies have histories: how we arrived at where we are today is very informative. There have always been, and always will be, alternatives.

Natural Sciences

How Our Brains Operate

By John J. Hopfield

We want to understand how mind emerges from brain, just as we understand how tornadoes emerge from molecules.

Historical Studies

The History of Science as a Bridge Between Disciplines

By Myles W. Jackson and Arnold J. Levine

On how the history of science can contribute to two controversial aspects of biomedical research: gene patenting, and race and genomics, and on recent advances in immunotherapy treatment of breast cancer

Historical Studies

Using Genetic Data to Revolutionize Understanding of Migration History

By Patrick J. Geary

Using next-generation sequencing, it is possible to examine past populations in their complex genetic heterogeneity.

Life: A Critical User’s Manual

By Didier Fassin

Cyclical movement of nature and worldly events, biology and biography: these are the two series that make life an entity at once overdetermined in its material dimension and indeterminate in its course . . . Can this binarism be resolved? Is it possible to think of life as biology and life as biography together?

Natural Sciences

Black Holes and the Information Paradox in String Theory

By Juan Maldacena

What if black holes behave like ordinary quantum mechanical objects—and information about them is not lost, as previously thought, but retained on their horizons?

Historical Studies

History, Climate, and the New Past

By Nicola Di Cosmo

Seen in the light of the antiquarian precedent, there is reason to believe that the contribution of the sciences of the past to historical research can help produce new histories. Yet, a word of caution is required.

Exploring the Topology of Locally Symmetric Spaces

By Akshay Venkatesh

Locally symmetric spaces are the home of the Langlands program—a set of overarching and interconnected conjectures connecting representation theory to number theory, first proposed in 1967 by Robert Langlands, now Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics.

Natural Sciences

The Advent and Fallout of EPR

By Kelly Devine Thomas

An IAS teatime conversation in 1935 between Nathan Rosen, Boris Podolsky, and Albert Einstein, about a fundamental issue of interpretation related to entangled wave-functions, introduced an ongoing debate over quantum physics.

Hospitality at the Hilbert Hotel

During the winter of 1924–25 at the University of Göttingen, David Hilbert gave a series of lectures about the infinite in mathematics, physics, and astronomy.

Natural Sciences

The Cool Alter-Ego of a Black Hole

By Juan Maldacena and Douglas Stanford

Black holes are spacetime geometries where the flow of time is distorted in a major way. What type of resource is a pair of entangled black holes?

Natural Sciences

Ahmed Almheiri: From the UAE to Firewalls

By Kelly Devine Thomas

In 2012, Ahmed Almheiri, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, coauthored a paper that confounded theoretical physicists, sparked attention from the New York Times to Scientific American, and prompted the organization of workshops and the publication of dozens of papers around the world.

Historical Studies

Who Wrote the Torah?

By Konrad Schmid

In light of more than two hundred years of scholarship, the most precise answer to this question still is: We don’t know. The tradition claims it was Moses, but the Torah itself says otherwise.

Historical Studies

Embedded Portraits: Appending a New Myth to an Old Myth

By Christopher S. Wood

The world is emergent and always unfolding in time. Painting has difficulty representing this kind of time. The portrait tries to do that, paradoxically, by representing the individual fixed in historical time.

How Do You Know a Nuclear Weapon Works If You Can't Test It?

By Hugh Gusterson

In 1987, in my third year as a graduate student in anthropology, I arrived in the small California town of Livermore, host to one of two nuclear weapons design laboratories in the United States. . . . intent on understanding the culture of the scientists, mainly physicists, who worked on the most powerful weapons on Earth.

A Mathematical Rosetta Stone

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

It is difficult to convey the enormous impact of his revolutionary idea. Langlands showed how the same formula can originate from two entirely different worlds of thought. To employ another metaphor: it is as if two chefs cooking with two entirely different recipes, ingredients, and methods of preparation, produce exactly the same dish.

Historical Studies

Security vs. Civil Liberties and Human Rights

By Daniela Luigia Caglioti

The outbreak of the war transformed them––independently of their personal story, feelings, ideas, and sense of belonging––into enemy aliens, accused of posing a threat to national security. As the war went on, the campaign against enemy aliens extended well beyond individuals who had originated from an enemy country. The loyalty of groups of citizens was questioned based on ethnic origin, religious belief, or former nationality.

A World of Prisons: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

By Didier Fassin

In France, the expansion of the prison population with its socioracial component occurred at the very moment when socioeconomic inequalities started to deepen after a long period of contraction and when ethnoracial minorities became the target of stigmatization campaigns from right-wing parties. The penal state has definitely been a way of governing the poor.

Historical Studies

Ellsworth Kelly’s Dream of Impersonality

By Yve-Alain Bois

I think there is no better introduction to Kelly’s work than his earlier years in Paris, especially when it comes to understanding why things that look apparently very simple are in fact much more complex than they seem.

Historical Studies

Genetics and Identity

By Patrick J. Geary

The imagined unity of a people could derive from shared customs, language, a common law, and a belief in a common origin, whether or not this origin was factual.

Historical Studies

The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition

By Sabine Schmidtke

The Yemeni manuscript collections constitute a unique treasure trove for large segments of the Islamic intellectual tradition—Sunni as well as Shii.

Historical Studies

Picasso Harlequin

By Yve-Alain Bois

There is an obvious playfulness in the way Picasso constantly shifted his artistic identity when least expected.

Natural Sciences

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

By Freeman J. Dyson

I do not take the Prisoner’s Dilemma seriously as a model of evolution of cooperation. I consider it likely that groups lacking cooperation are like dodoes, losing the battle for survival collectively rather than individually.

Historical Studies

Authoritarian Culture in the Arab World

By Kevin W Martin

After seizing power on his own behalf in December 1949, Army Colonel Adib al-Shishakli effectively ruled Syria for much of the next five years, during which he wrought long-term changes in Syria’s political culture and initiated a host of policies and practices subsequently adopted by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and other authoritarian rulers.

Historical Studies

Leonardo’s Watery Chaos

By Irving Lavin

Leonardo was truly enthralled, not to say obsessed, by water—so much so that this fact in itself calls for explanation.