Mathematics

Frequent Director's Visitor Graham Farmelo has interviewed IAS scholars past and present—including Nima Arkani-Hamed, Sir Michael Atiyah, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Freeman Dyson, Michael Green, Juan Maldacena, Greg Moore, Sir Roger Penrose, and Edward Witten—to discuss mathematics, physics, and the interplay between them. 

"In a perverse way, the refutation of a great conjecture can be even better news than its success, since the failure makes clear that our imagined map of the mathematical world is seriously wrong. Defeat can be productive, the reverse of a Pyrrhic victory." In a column for Quanta Magazine, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, covers how conjectures are proven, what makes a particular one great, and the role conjecture plays in the advancement of mathematics.