Mathematics

"In 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other, Barricelli hovered over one of the world’s earliest and most influential computers...

Tracy Slatyer, Junior Visiting Professor (2018–19) and Member (2010–13) in the School of Natural Sciences, Thomas Hartman, Member (2010–13) in the School, and Lillian B. Pierce, von Neumann Fellow (2017–18) in the School of Mathematics, have been...

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. 

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters made a short film about Karen Uhlenbeck, Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, in conjunction with the 2019 Abel Prize she received “for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial...

"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.

The American Mathematical Society has awarded the 2019 Award for Mathematics Programs that Make a Difference to the Women and Mathematics Program at the Institute for Advanced Study for its "outstanding program of encouraging women to pursue...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Project, which aims to capture the first-ever image of a black hole, will make a major announcement on Wednesday, April 10, at 9:00 a.m. EST (13:00 UTC) that can be viewed live from the player above.

With properties...

"On the evening of March 19, the mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck gathered with revelers at the Institute for Advanced Study for a champagne reception. Some hours earlier she’d been awarded the Abel Prize—the first time a woman had won it—for her...

Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, has been awarded the 2019 Donald E. Knuth Prize.

Conferred annually by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and the IEEE Technical Committee on...

"When I started out as a student, it was clear that the way to become a mathematician was not to hang around with other women. So I made my way through my career and, at some point, I achieved a certain amount of fame and I looked around and talked...