Ideas

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...

The Institute was invited by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute to cosponsor and promote the country’s first National Math Festival, a three-day celebration held April 16–18 in Washington, D.C., to encourage and support the math of today...

The image taken of the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was among Albert Einstein’s possessions when he died in 1955, then Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics. The image, taken by astronomer Arthur Eddington and now in the collection...

Prospects in Theoretical Physics is summer program designed for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars considering a career in theoretical physics. First held by the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in the summer...

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, Yasmine Bouagga, Isabelle Coutant, Jean-Sébastien Eideliman, Fabrice Fernandez, Nicolas Fischer, Carolina Kobelinsky, Chowra Makaremi, Sarah Mazouz, and Sébastien Roux...

“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

Brill Academic Publishers has published The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (2015), edited by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, David Hollenberg of the University of Oregon, and Christoph Rauch of Staatsbibliothek zu...

As Chief Scientist at Dstillery, Claudia Perlich works to collect about 10 billion user events daily, representing the digital and geo-physical journeys of millions of people on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. In this lecture, Perlich explores a number of challenges including privacy-preserving representations, robust high-dimensional modeling, large-scale automated learning systems, transfer learning, and fraud detection.

In this lecture, Max Tegmark surveys how humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of the cosmos, but also the power of the human mind to understand it using mathematical equations. He explores how mathematics in physics has allowed us...