Ideas

This event celebrates the work and life of Emmy Noether, one of the first Visitors at the Institute from 1933–35. A highly prolific mathematician who published groundbreaking papers in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory, Noether is...

In 1990, Karen Uhlenbeck, 2019 Abel Prize Laureate, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, and co-founder of the Institute’s Women and Mathematics Program, became the second woman to give a Plenary Lecture at the...

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...

Richard Schwartz, Member (2003–04) in the School of Mathematics and the Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University, discusses really large numbers, as well as the different sizes of infinity and the different forms of infinite space. 

Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer
Director of Above

Dear Sir,

First, please let me apologize for my manner of speaking when we discussed quantum theory recently. This manner is unjustifiably aggressive.

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...

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...