Ideas

Zhengkai Li, a participant in the 2023 Women in Mathematics program, recounts her recent archival investigations into C.S. Wang Chang, the Institute's first woman of color, who joined the School of Mathematics/Natural Sciences in 1945.

Natalie Zemon Davis, Member (1978) in the School of Social Science and one of the pioneering historians of her time and ours, died in Toronto on October 21 at the age of 94. Professors Joan Wallach Scott (SSS) and Francesca Trivellato (SHS) penned a tribute piece in remembrance of a scholar considered a "historian of hope" and "the incarnation of immortal energy."

Lindsey D. Cameron, Member in the School of Social Science, studies Uber. "Well, I don’t study strictly Uber per se," she says, "but it’s easier to digest than saying I study the rise of the platform economy and algorithmic management, and its implications on labor."

Weishun Zhong, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, uses tools from statistical physics to study the brain and AI. "Although these two might appear very different at first glance," he states, "when zoomed out and abstracted away, they are both just networks of basic units called neurons."

Shiyue Li, Member in the School of Mathematics, is interested in algebraic geometry and combinatorics. As a researcher she enjoys, in her words, “the freedom to wonder about fascinating things in nature, and the connections with other minds from around the world.”

The research of Brad Bolman, Founders' Circle Member in the School of Historical Studies, focuses on the history of knowledge about organisms since the nineteenth century. "I study how scientists and other interested parties come to know what an organism is, whether it’s a beagle, a rose, or a truffle," he explains.

After the death of several dozens of refugees, most of them fleeing Afghanistan, in a shipwreck off the coasts of Calabria, in the South of Italy, on the 26th of February 2023, Lorenzo Alunni, current Member in the School of Social Science, and Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, wrote a column for Le Monde, analyzing how Europe had shifted from a politics of rescue to a criminalization of humanitarianism.

Art historian Marilyn Aronberg Lavin describes how three busts attributed to Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini shaped the career of her husband Irving Lavin, past Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and how she recently repatriated one of these artworks to Italy from her home at IAS.

Reflecting on preliminary results obtained from a seven-year HistoGenes project, Patrick J. Geary, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, describes how advances in the field of paleogenom­ics are not only revolutionizing the study of paleolithic hominids but are also allowing scholars to answer questions about much more recent history, previously inaccessible using traditional historical and archae­ological sources.

In this excerpt, Freeman Dyson, Faculty (1952–2020) in the School of Natural Sciences, ascends the New Court clock tower at St. John’s College, Cambridge during a wartime blackout.