The Islamic World and the Radical Enlightenment: Toleration, Freethinking and Personal Liberty
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Jonathan Israel, Professor, School of Historical Studies
In the 1660s and onward, the Radical Enlightenment pushed for full freedom of thought, religious freedom, and personal liberty together with democracy and the principle of equality.  In this lecture, Jonathan Israel addresses how this part of the Western Enlightenment used medieval Islamic freethinkers and their ideas, and interpreted the special features of Islamic society and politics to illustrate and broaden its own arguments for transforming the Western World.  In recent years, this intellectual movement has been much more intensively studied and better understood, and this lecture -- the outgrowth of a highly innovative colloquium recently held at the Institute, Islamic Freethinking and Western Radicalism -- will highlight recent research into what might be broadly termed the Democratic Enlightenment. 

This lecture is presented with support provided by the Dr. S.T. Lee Fund for Historical Studies.

Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals
Friday, May 2, 2008

Eric Maskin, Albert O. Hirschman Professor, School of Social Science
Eric Maskin shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in Mechanism Design Theory. This is the study of how, given an economic or social goal, we can design a procedure or institution (that is, a mechanism) for achieving that goal.  In this lecture, he gives an introduction to mechanism design using several simple examples.  The lecture is nontechnical and suitable for a general audience.

  lo | hi

2008 Leon Levy Foundation Member Lecture
The Lot of the Unemployed
Wednesday, April 12, 2008

Alan B. Krueger, Leon Levy Foundation Member, School of Social Science
The unemployment rate is rising and job growth turned negative in January 2008.  Some economists view unemployment as a minor concern while others argue it is a serious malady.  This lecture presents new evidence on the lot of the unemployed, in the U.S. and other countries, including the psychological well-being of the unemployed and how the unemployed spend their time, with a particular focus on time spent searching for a new job. The effect of unemployment benefits on job search activity is considered from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

  lo | hi

Solutions to Equations in Integers
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Peter Sarnak, Professor, School of Mathematics
Through the works of Fermat, Gauss, and Lagrange, we understand which positive integers can be represented as sums of two, three, or four squares. Hilbert's 11th problem, from 1900, extends this question to more general quadratic equations. Its complete solution relies on recent advances in related fields as well as many developments over the years. Professor Sarnak explains some of these as well as select far-reaching conjectures that the problem has inspired.
 

Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk
The High Male Voice: Castrato, Countertenor, and Male Alto
Friday, March 7, 2008

Russell Oberlin, Countertenor 

            lo | hi

Modernism between Weimar and the Third Reich
Sunday, March 2, 2008

Peter Paret, Professor Emeritus, School of Historical Studies

From 1933 to 1945, a culture war was waged between National-Socialism and modernism in the arts.  In this lecture, given in conjunction with a performance by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra featuring works by Mendelssohn, Schulhoff, and von Webern, Peter Paret explains that although their compositions were stylistically different, they were attacked for the same underlying reason:  Hitler's concept of the arts as an arena of ideological, racial, and political conflict over Germany's present and future.

  lo | hi

What to Do with Sound-Bites: On Politics and Propaganda in the 21st Century
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor, School of Social Science
The political season is upon us and so, if they were not before, our newspapers, radios, computer screens and televisions are now overfull with sound-bites; and countless people are complaining about the degradation of political conversation. But is a sound-bite really such a bad thing? In the Western context, Homer was the first purveyor of them and Aristotle offered the first theory of them, but he called them maxims. This lecture explores why sound-bites are a necessary and valuable part of political conversation, consider the ways in which they are also dangerous, and analyzes the particular challenges to political discourse presented by the new media of the 21st century. At the end of the day, it is listeners, not speakers, who have the most work to do to deal responsibly with sound-bites.

 lo  | hi

Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk
Confessions of a Critic
Friday, February 8, 2008

Terry Teachout, Music and Drama Critic, Commentary and The Wall Street Journal 

Tracking Influenza Virus Epidemics over the Past Century: Can We Predict Next Year's Epidemic?
Wednesday, December 5

Arnold J. Levine, Professor, The Simons Center for Systems Biology, School of Natural Sciences
Influenza viruses are unusual because we can become infected by a similar virus almost every year during our lifetime and occasionally there are worldwide pandemics that can cause many fatalities. Why does our usually excellent immune system fail us? How does this come about?

 lo  | hi 

Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk
A Composer's World Today
Friday, November 5, 2007

Paul Moravec, Artist-in-Residence, Institute for Advanced Study

lo | hi

Space Tourist
October 25, 2007

Charles Simonyi, Institute Trustee and President and CEO,
Intentional Software Corporation

Space flight is still a very rare and exotic experience which has only recently been opened to "tourists," officially known as spaceflight participants. Dr. Simonyi was the fifth of these as the 450th person in space. Under a contract with Space Adventures and the Russian Space Agency, he rode a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft into orbit to visit the International Space Station (ISS), and returned on another Soyuz, landing in central Kazakhstan after a 14-day stay in space. Parts of the Soyuz system date back to the beginning of the Space Age, which started on October 4, 1957 with the launch of Sputnik I. Dr. Simonyi describes the six month training process and the flight itself from the point of view of a knowledgeable civilian, with particular emphasis on the issues of system reliability, traditions, and health aspects.  

       lo | hi

The History of Others: Foreign Peoples in Early Chinese Historiography
October 17, 2007

Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, School of Historical Studies

This lecture will provide an overview of the production and characteristics of alien history in early China, while acknowledging and attempting to gauge the cultural influence of these accounts among the alien people themselves, as "consumers" of histories they did not produce, but were used politically and in other ways. These reflections may also serve as a first step towards a comparative discussion, across the historiographic traditions of literate civilizations, about the fundamental issues of who wrote alien histories, why, and for whom.

        lo | hi

Edward T. Cone Concert Series Talk
Jewish Music and the Electric Eclectic
Friday, October 5, 2007

Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University 

lo  | hi

2+1-Dimensional Gravity Revisited

July 26, 2007

Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor
School of Natural Sciences

lo  | hi

Prospects in Theoretical Physics

High Energy scattering at strong coupling via AdS/CFT

July 25, 2007

Juan Maldacena, Professor
School of  Natural Sciences

lo  | hi

Prospects in Theoretical Physics

Warped Conifolds and their Applications to Cosmology

July 19, 2007

Igor Klebanov, Professor
Princeton University 

lo  | hi

Terrorism and Just War
May 4, 2007

           lo  | hi

Afghanistan and Iraq: Failed States or Failed Wars
March 28, 2007

Lakhdar Brahimi, Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Having assisted in the postwar transitions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Brahimi speaks about the circumstances that have led to the current situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. His lecture examines the recent history of both countries and offers his perspective on the actions and non-actions that have led to the present crisis. 

  lo  | hi

The Difficult Task of Erasing Oneself: Non-Composition in Twentieth-Century Art
March 7, 2007

  lo  | hi

The Mathematical Infinity
January 31, 2007

Enrico Bombieri, IBM von Neumann Professor, School of Mathematics

This lecture, accessible to a wide audience, explores how mathematics has arrived at its present pragmatic view of infinity and some of the counterintuitive paradoxes, as well as some of the positive results, deriving from its acceptance. It concludes with a view of how computer science is leading today to a new precise concept, namely the impossibly large in the realm of the finite.  

           lo  | hi

Why Haven't Global Markets Reduced Inequality?
October 27, 2006

Eric Maskin , Albert O. Hirschmann Professor, School of Social Science

Proponents of free trade have argued that expanding global markets should reduce income inequality in poorer countries. So far, however, there is no compelling evidence that such a reduction has occurred. In this lecture, Professor Maskin outlines the theory on which the free traders' argument is based -- the theory of comparative advantage -- and proposes an alternative theory that seems more consistent with the evidence to date.  

          lo  | hi

The World's Largest Experiment
October 4, 2006

Nathan Seiberg, Professor, School of Natural Sciences 

This lecture discusses how the Large Hadron Collider is expected to provide further information about the standard model of particle physics, which describes the elementary particles and the forces acting between them. Among the potential discoveries the LHC may yield are new insights about the origin of mass, the physics of the early universe, new symmetries of nature and extra space dimensions. It will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of high energy physics.