Material objects play a role in all religions. Jewish women
light candles for the Sabbath; Christians sprinkle or douse bodies
with water to baptize; Hindus offer coconuts and clarified butter
to images of the gods and goddesses; the ancient Incas...
This lecture, presented by Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the
School of Mathematics, was part of the Institute for Advanced
Study’s celebration of its eightieth anniversary, and took place
during the events related to the Schools of Mathematics...
John Milnor
commented on D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, first
published in 1917, which studied how the shape of an organism
changes as it grows and the way that shape changes in the course of
evolution. Milnor discussed the hypothesis that...
In this lecture, John
Milnor, Co-Director of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences
at Stony Brook University and a former member of the Faculty of the
School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study
(1970-90), offers commentary on the...
The study of expander graphs has been a rapidly developing
subject in discrete mathematics and computer science. Expander
graphs are sparse graphs, meaning they have few edges, with strong
connectivity properties. They have many applications...
Quantum theory radically transforms our fundamental
understanding of physical reality. It reveals that the world
contains a hidden richness of structure that we have barely begun
to control and exploit. According to quantum theory, what we
perceive...
This lecture, presented by Jean
Bourgain, IBM von Neumann Professor in the School of
Mathematics, was part of the Institute for Advanced Study’s
celebration of its eightieth anniversary, and took place during the
events related to the Schools and...
In this talk, Nima
Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences,
discusses the direction of fundamental physics in coming years and
decades, including efforts to replace the concept of spacetime and
understand how the macroscopic world...
The splendid portrait of Erwin Panofsky, late Professor in the
School of Historical Studies, installed in the Institute’s
Historical Studies–Social Science Library, was commissioned from
Philip Pearlstein in 1993. The portrait was the result of a...
The mathematical problems arising from modern celestial
mechanics, which originated with Isaac Newton’s Principia
in 1687, have led to many mathematical theories. Poincaré
(1854–1912) discovered that a system of several celestial bodies
moving under...