Video Lectures

Historians of Science and Medicine emphasize how the circulation of human biological material for global science involves complex exchange systems amongst foreign and local scientists. Here, notions of the gift and reciprocity underpin the idiom of...

Developments in fundamental physics over the last century have led to the formulation of a universal language successfully describing Nature from the subatomic scale to the universe as a whole. This language is known as quantum field theory. In...

Histories of ancient cultures often present the image of clearly recognizable peoples. Those who are centered in historical canons—Egyptians, Greeks, Romans—are often subject to the most longstanding and unyielding historical expectations. In this...

IAS Director Robbert Dijkgraaf recently remarked that 21st century scientists are shifting “from studying what is to what could be.” We urgently need a social science of what could be, if we are to face challenges from inequality and racial...

Most readers of Toni Morrison know her best as a novelist. She is the author of 11 extraordinary works of fiction, including the 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, and her work is assigned in high school and college classrooms and debated at book club...

Mathematics is an extremely deep and extensive subject, but amazingly we are surrounded by easily stated mathematical problems about which almost nothing is known. These kinds of problems tantalize mathematicians with their combination of simplicity...

Black holes create the most extreme gravitational fields imaginable, and therefore offer a unique and unprecedented opportunity to test our current understanding of gravity. We've known about the existence of black holes in space for many years but...

The IAS has the world's second largest collection of epigraphic squeezes, and a project is under way to digitize them. But what is an epigraphic squeeze? What's more, how does one digitize a squeeze? And why does any of this matter? In this talk...