The Institute Letter Spring 2009

Physicists have used Feynman diagrams as a tool for calculating scattering amplitudes that describe particle interactions for more than six decades. Their broad utility was due initially in large part to the seminal work of Freeman Dyson, Professor...

Professor Caroline Walker Bynum describes the Institute’s School of Historical Studies not as a history department in the traditional sense, but rather a school that “offers the study of phenomena from a historical perspective.” In “Perspectives...

“Scientific research in many domains of knowledge has time after time proved the necessity of abandoning or remoulding viewpoints which, due to their fruitfulness and apparently unrestricted applicability, were regarded as indispensable for rational...

My father Alladi Ramakrishnan (1923–2008), who made significant contributions to stochastic processes, elementary particle physics, matrix algebra, and the special theory of relativity, passed away at my home in Gainesville, Florida, last June, at...

A conference on algebraic and differential geometry was held last fall in celebration of the seventieth birthday of former Institute Director (1991–2003) Phillip A. Griffiths, a Professor in the School of Mathematics, who will retire at the end of...

The Institute for Advanced Study celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), located at Bures-sur-Yvette, France, with an event at IAS last November. Attendees included IHÉS...

Michelle Girvan, the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Founders’ Circle Member in the School of Social Science during the 2008–09 academic year, is one of many physicists who have been drawn in recent years to study complex systems beyond the purely...

On September 29, 1940, a small band of League of Nations employees and their families arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study, where they would base the civilian operations of the League’s Economic and Financial Organization for the next five...