James Peebles,
Member (1977–78) and Visitor (1990–91, 1998–99) in the School of
Natural Sciences, has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics
(see his lecture above) for his “contributions to our understanding
of the evolution of the universe...
In the last six months, Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg
Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, has received three
major awards: the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences; the 2018 Einstein Medal from the Albert...
"It's kind of like physics in its formative stages—Newton asking
what makes the apple fall down," says Sanjeev Arora, Visiting Professor in
the School of Mathematics, trying to explain the current scientific
excitement about machine learning....
In 2012, Ahmed Almheiri,
current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, coauthored a
paper that confounded theoretical physicists, sparked attention
from the New York Times to Scientific American,
and prompted the organization of workshops and...
Albert Einstein finished his general theory of relativity in
November 1915, and in the hundred years since, its influence has
been profound, dramatically influencing the direction of physics,
cosmology, and mathematics. The theory upended Isaac...
Three years ago, just before it was scheduled to shut down in
preparation for its second phase, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
discovered the Higgs boson. Its discovery was expected, having been
predicted nearly sixty years earlier by Peter Higgs...
When Sabine Schmidtke and Hassan Ansari, an Iranian national,
met more than a decade ago in Tehran, Ansari was a student of the
traditional religious system in Qum and Tehran (the “Hawza”).
Ansari had read Schmidtke’s doctoral thesis The
Theology...
“Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” read the New
York Times headline last March 17. In a seemingly momentous
news conference at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
researchers using a BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic...
A year ago in April, the editors of the Annals of
Mathematics, a journal published by the Institute and
Princeton University, received an email with a submission by an
unknown mathematician. “Bounded Gaps Between Primes” by Yitang
Zhang, an adjunct...
