FY2025

Principal Investigators

Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor, School of Natural Science
Xiaoliang Qi, Member, School of Natural Sciences

Duration

July 2025 - June 2026

Project Summary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to accelerate scientific research and discovery in many areas of mathematics and physics. In the area of quantum physics, for instance, AI algorithms are being used to model complex quantum systems, suggest new quantum experiments, optimize quantum computations, and aid in understanding quantum gravity and chaos.

This collaborative project explores connections between AI and machine learning with quantum information and quantum gravity. In particular, some modern ideas of quantum gravity involve mathematical structures that are similar to the concepts that underlie AI techniques: tensor networks to represent quantum states and computational neural networks to represent probability distributions, locality in physics and the idea of sparse auto encoders in AI, and the role of geometry in representing information more generally.  

Principal Investigators

Wei Ho, Visiting Professor, School of Mathematics
Anne-Katrin Gallagher, Gallagher Tool & Instrument, Redmond, WA
Purvi Gupta, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Liz Vivas, Ohio State University

Duration

July 2025 - June 2026

Project Summary

The objective of this week-long workshop, to be held at the IAS in June of 2026, is to enable established and newly initiated research groups to work collaboratively on current research projects in various branches of several complex variables and adjacent fields. It will offer a platform that encourages continued collaboration and mentoring, and strengthens the community in the field of several complex variables.

The workshop will bring together junior and senior participants to work on pre-defined research projects. Participants will be assigned to project groups and will spend their time at the workshop engaged in focused and substantive research. In order to promote the exchange and interaction of ideas and methods, each research group will have two experts as co-leads and up to three participants who are not necessarily experts in the topic of their research group. The topics to be explored include holomorphic mapping theory, complex dynamics in several variables, Cauchy-Riemann geometry, operator theory, and metric geometry. This workshop is jointly supported by the Minerva Research Program and the IAS. The Nelson Center’s funding will be available as a backstop should additional support for the workshop be required.

Principal Investigators

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor, School of Historical Studies
Sofía Torallas Tovar, Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Historical Studies
George Kiraz, Senior Research Associate, Nelson Center for Collaborative Research

Duration

July 2025 - June 2030

Project Summary

The Arabic Gospel texts are among the earliest sustained efforts to render the Christian scriptures in the language of Islam—a process that involved not only translation but also deep hermeneutic and theological negotiation between divergent Middle Eastern Christian groups. While traditionally viewed as a late or derivative tradition, the Arabic Gospels occupy a pivotal position in the development of Christian scriptural transmission in the Near East on the eve of the advent of Islam.

This project reframes the Arabic Gospel texts not as marginal translations—as they have been treated by academic biblical scholarship thus far—but as central witnesses to the vibrant processes of interlingual and intercultural engagement that shaped the Christian Middle East in dialogue with its Greek, Syriac, and Coptic antecedents. By integrating philology, manuscript studies, translation theory, and digital tools, this interdisciplinary project aims to produce a new scholarly paradigm for understanding the Arabic Gospels.

Principal Investigators

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, School of Social Science
Jenny Reardon, University of California, Santa Cruz

Duration

July 2025 - June 2027

Project Summary

Vannevar Bush’s influential 1945 report “Science–The Endless Frontier” advocated for “pure science”—a model of government funding in exchange for scientific autonomy from political direction, with the expectation of broad social benefit. This became the dominant framework for American science policy. Seventy-five years later, this interdisciplinary project examines the historical evolution and contemporary crisis of research policy in the United States, with particular attention to the social contract between scientific institutions, democratic governance, and the public.

The project will establish an interdisciplinary research network bringing together researchers and practitioners with a broad range of disciplinary expertise, methodological approaches, and theoretical perspectives to develop scholarly frameworks for analyzing models of public science. This network will launch with two convenings: “Re-Envisioning Democratic Accountability and Science” (December 2025) and “Enacting Public Science” (Spring 2026). The first workshop will critically assess the documents that underwrite current U.S. science policy, particularly Bush’s “Science–The Endless Frontier.” The second will address questions vital to developing policy frameworks for a robust, publicly accountable research ecosystem.

Principal Investigators

Irit Dveer Dinur, Betsey Lombard Overdeck Theory of Computing Professor, School of Mathematics
Doron Puder, Kovner Member, School of Mathematics

Duration

July 2025 - June 2026

Project Summary

Mathematical structures known as expanders have played a crucial role in computer science, coding theory, and pure mathematics. While expander graphs are well understood, high dimensional expanders, which are generalizations of expander graphs to higher dimensions, remain mysterious. For instance, many important properties of expander graphs have been proven to exist using the random graph model, but high dimensional expanders are only known to exist via very sophisticated group theoretic constructions.

This project explores new approaches to understanding high-dimensional expanders through randomness—a method that has been immensely successful in graph theory but remains largely unexplored in higher dimensions. By bringing together expertise in high-dimensional expansion and random covers, this collaborative project has the potential to bridge different areas and open up new directions in mathematics. Given the wide-ranging applications of random structures such as graphs, having a theory of random covers for high dimensional expanders is expected to have a lasting impact.

Principal Investigators

Sofía Torallas Tovar, Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Historical Studies
Christopher Faraone, University of Chicago

Duration

July 2025 - June 2028

Project Summary

Transmission of Magical Knowledge is a long-standing project, led by the University of Chicago, that brings an international group of scholars together to analyze, reedit, translate, and study the Greco-Egyptian magical handbooks that have been preserved on papyrus. In 2022, the team published The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF) Volume 1, which contained new editions and translations of 54 magical handbooks or fragments of them, and the award-winning The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies: Libraries, Books and Individual Recipes, a volume of essays on the materiality and scribal features of the magic formularies. 

The project will continue this work over the next three years (2026–28) to publish the second volume of GEMF and then focus on the third volume of GEMF, which will complete the reedition, translation, and commentary of the 88 extant Greco-Egyptian magical formularies from Egypt. Other activities include organizing international conferences on the drawings in the magical handbooks and on voces magicae, the unintelligible “magical names” and ancient abracadabra words that proliferate in the magical handbooks.

Principal Investigators

Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor, School of Natural Sciences
Edward Witten, Professor Emeritus, School of Natural Sciences
Netta Engelhardt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology  
Jonah Kudler-Flam, Marvin L. Goldberger Member, School of Natural Sciences 
Henry Lin, Princeton University 
Gautam Satishchandran, Princeton University 

Duration

July 2025 - June 2026

Project Summary

This three-day workshop aims to explore quantum aspects of black holes and spacetimes. Jointly supported by the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Princeton Gravity Initiative, and IAS, the event will involve 175 participants from diverse fields. Specific topics will include quantum information applied to gravity, and quantum aspects of black holes and other interesting spacetimes such as de-Sitter.  

The workshop format, with structured talks from leading experts and open-ended dialogue, is intended to facilitate the deep, focused work needed to analyze this important topic in-depth, understand its associated problems, and move the research forward. More details on the event are available here. 

Principal Investigator

Francesca Trivellato, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, School of Historical Studies

Duration

July 2026 - June 2027

Project Summary

Limited partnerships are often described as the precursors to modern corporations. They are also sometimes still erroneously assumed to be a distinctly Western organizational form. In spite of these broad claims, there are still no large-scale empirical studies examining how widespread this business structure was in preindustrial Europe, who used it most often, where, and why. The State Archives of Florence, Italy, house the most comprehensive collection of relevant records for the period before 1800. These registers contain nearly 5,000 summary contracts of limited partnerships signed over 363 years, from 1445 to 1808. Preliminary findings by Francesca Trivellato indicate that these sources call into question many assumptions in the existing literature, necessitating new hypotheses and further investigation.

This exploratory project aims to upgrade the platform used to analyze and visualize these archival records and to collect additional documentation needed to combine quantitative analysis with case studies. The project requires the collaboration of software engineers, scholars, and archivists. It will contribute to Trivellato’s long-term goal of writing a new business history of early modern Tuscany that demonstrates how both digital and traditional methods are indispensable to addressing longstanding debates about the development of Western capitalism.

Principal Investigator

Angelos Chaniotis, Professor, School of Historical Studies

Duration

July 2026 - June 2027

Project Summary

Lyttos, a prominent city of ancient Crete, flourished during the Classical and Hellenistic periods but was destroyed by the Knossians in 221/20 B.C.E. and later rebuilt. Under Roman rule, the city thrived, particularly due to the export of its wine, which was highly sought after, as evidenced by amphoras found in Pompeii marked as containing "Lyttian wine." The city's aqueduct is one of the best-preserved ancient constructions on the island, while its large Roman theater was documented by Onorio Belli in the sixteenth century. Excavations at the site were initially limited but have been renewed since 2021 under the auspices of the Athens Archaeological Society. Significant findings include a fully excavated bouleuterion (town hall) adjacent to a shrine dedicated to the emperor and a variety of sculptures, pottery, and architectural fragments, which are currently stored for further study.

The ongoing excavation project involves an international team of experts in archaeology, history, epigraphy, and related fields, and has been supported by various external sponsors. In the study phase, which will take place from July 2026 to June 2027, the project will document and study material found during the excavation of part of the town hall in 1983 and 1986 and complete the study of the architecture of the shrine for the cult of the emperor. The project will also study one of the largest assemblages of pottery from Roman and Late Antique Crete ever found—and one of the few systematically studied—and publish this material in a monograph.

Principal Investigators

Michail Tsodyks, C.V. Starr Professor, School of Natural Sciences
Sebastian Seung, Princeton University

Duration

July 2026 - June 2027

Project Summary

In the twenty-first century, new kinds of brain maps have poised visual neuroscience for a renaissance, starting with the fruit fly Drosophila. The creation of the fly connectome yielded the first wiring diagram for an entire visual system, placing network models of insect vision on a robust foundation. Furthermore, by precisely identifying synaptic receptors and ion channels, transcriptomics and proteomics improve the accuracy of cellular models, making biophysical realism more attainable.

This collaborative project aims to advance fly vision research by establishing robust models for sensory perception—encompassing motion, color, polarization, and form—and relating these to complex, visually guided motor behaviors. More broadly, this initiative promises a transformative impact, establishing a new paradigm for theoretical and computational neuroscience rooted in advanced, modern brain mapping. 

Principal Investigators

Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor, School of Natural Sciences
Igor Klebanov, Princeton University 

Duration

July 2026 - June 2027

Project Summary

This three-day workshop aims to explore quantum universes. Recent progress in understanding quantum aspects of black holes motivates us to explore the implications of these ideas to closed universes and cosmological spacetimes. The workshop will also explore quantum aspects associated with new spacetime topologies.

Jointly supported by Princeton University and IAS, the workshop will involve 175 participants from diverse fields. The workshop format, with structured talks from leading experts and open-ended dialogue, is intended to facilitate the deep, focused work needed to analyze this important topic in depth, understand its associated problems, and move the research forward.