Ideas

In 1981, a group of French pediatricians published a paper about a case of lead poisoning in the Archives Françaises de Pédiatrie. The clinical history of a five-year-old boy named Mammar was described in detail. He had been suffering from...

“The Jewish Political Tradition” is now a twenty-year-old project. Together with colleagues from Israel, all of whom have spent time here at the Institute, I have been working on it since the late 1980s. Menachem Lorberbaum and Noam Zohar, from the...

In 2004, a Member of the Classics section of the School of Historical Studies I was chatting with told me that some badly burnt papyri dating from the sixth century had been found in a church during excavations at Petra in Jordan. Modern technology...

The recovery of Mesopotamian mathematics was pioneered in the early thirties by Otto Neugebauer (1899-1990), an eminent Member of the Institute for Advanced Study whose association with the Institute spanned forty-five years. Neugebauer began his...

The splendid portrait of Erwin Panofsky, late Professor in the School of Historical Studies, installed in the Institute’s Historical Studies–Social Science Library, was commissioned from Philip Pearlstein in 1993. The portrait was the result of a...

On November 20, 1958, J. Robert Oppenheimer (right), Director (1947–66) of the Institute for Advanced Study, and George F. Kennan (center), then Professor in the School of Historical Studies and former Ambassador to Russia, conferred with nine...

Andrew Granville, a Member in the School of Mathematics, describes the origins and making of an experimental work that blurred the boundaries between pure mathematics, film, and live performance. It premiered in Wolfensohn Hall on December 12.

Mathem...

According to the conventional account, American lawyers and judges from the 1870s through the 1920s believed in “legal formalism”—that law is a comprehensive and logically ordered body of rules and principles and judges mechanically deduce the...

If two such great thinkers as Bohr and Einstein, who had such a high regard for each other, could be brought together for a prolonged period, would not something emerge of great value to all of us? This thought and this hope animated the guiding spirits of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to invite Niels Bohr to come as a guest of the Institute for the entire spring semester of 1939.

The mathematical problems arising from modern celestial mechanics, which originated with Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, have led to many mathematical theories. Poincaré (1854–1912) discovered that a system of several celestial bodies moving under...