The desire to discover distant, rare, and strange objects
dominated twentieth-century astronomy, for which increasingly
larger and more sensitive telescopes were constructed.
The act of carrying out this objective has brought enormous—and
somewhat...
A sign and eight low buildings pass
unnoticed in a field the size of Central
Park: a wall-flower by a college town.
Wandering its halls, one chair offices,
bare egg white walls, nothing stands out until
I reach a lounge where mathematical
notations...
On November 14, the Institute for Advanced Study announced
the appointment of Robbert Dijkgraaf as its ninth Director,
succeeding, as of July 1, 2012, Peter Goddard, who has served as
Director since January 2004.
In the two years I spent at the Institute, 1957–59, I had the
opportunity of meeting two of the founders of the quantum
theory—Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac. In the case of Bohr, perhaps
“meeting” overstates the case. He was a Member in the spring
of...
The stability of the solar system is one of the oldest problems
in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton. After Newton
discovered his famous laws of motion and gravity, he used these to
determine the motion of a single planet around the...
The ancients thought that space and time were preexisting entities on which motion happens. Of course, this is also our naive intuition. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we know that this is not true. Space and time are dynamical objects whose shape is modified by the bodies that move in it.
I remember fondly the two years I spent at IAS working with
Steve Adler on the experimental implications of unified field
theories of elementary particle interactions. We also tackled a
very hard problem that still is unsolved—how to reconcile...
In this lecture, given at a Friends Form held at the Institute
on May 11, 2011, Marilena
LoVerde, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, explains
theories of evolutionary history of the universe and how we use
current astrophysical data to...
In the twentieth century, mathematicians developed a deep
theory of knots, which was revolutionized by the discovery of the
Jones polynomial—a way to calculate a number for every knot—by
Vaughan F. R. Jones in the early 1980s. Below, Edward
Witten...
It all began with a cable from Oppenheimer that I received on March 10, 1948, in Trondheim, Norway: ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF BOHR AND HEITLER I AM GLAD TO OFFER YOU MEMBERSHIP SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1948 – 1949 WITH STIPEND OF $3500. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER.
