In the beginning of the twentieth century, the University of
Göttingen was one of the top research centers for mathematics in
the world. The mathematician David Hilbert was a well-established
professor there, and during the winter semester of 1924...
During a visit to the Institute in the 1970s, the mathematician
John Horton Conway, then of Cambridge, spent the ten most
interesting minutes of his life. Invited to deliver a talk to the
undergraduate math club at Princeton, Conway made his way...
My earliest mathematical memories involve my father. One is of a
walk from home to the edge of downtown Metuchen (the tiny central
Jersey town where I grew up), to a little luncheonette called The
Corner Confectionary. This wasn’t a frequent or...
Does beauty exist in mathematics? The question concerns
mathematical objects and their relations, the real subject of
verifiable proofs. Mathematicians generally agree that beauty does
exist in the structural beauty of theorems and proofs, even
if...
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a pillar of
modern physics formulated 100 years ago, was celebrated by the
Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University in a two-day
conference, General Relativity at 100. The conference...
Topology is the branch of geometry that deals with large-scale
features of shapes. One cliché is that a topologist cannot
distinguish a doughnut from a coffee cup: if a coffee cup were made
of rubber, one could continuously deform it to a doughnut...
In 2006, Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School
of Natural Sciences, cowrote with Anton Kapustin a 225-page paper,
“Electric-Magnetic Duality and the Geometric Langlands Program,” on
the relation of part of the geometric Langlands...
The Rubik’s Cube is one of the most popular toys in history. It
is also an example of a permutation puzzle, which have existed in
mathematics in one form or another for at least 140 years. In
hindsight, it is strange that the cube ever became so...
“It’s not obvious where this is going. Maybe it will be
something spectacular. Maybe it will just be a curiosity. We don’t
know. But it’s something. And it’s a beautiful something.”—Nima Arkani-Hamed
