Ideas

Bodies bound by gravity can evolve in surprising ways. In accord with everyday experience and physical law, heat flows from regions of high to low temperature, and angular momentum from regions of fast to slow spin. However, counter to intuition, in...

Two years ago I was asked to organize a ­medium-­size Picasso exhibition in Rome, the first in that city since 1953, that would function as an introduction to the artist’s work for a whole generation of Romans who had not been exposed to it (unless...

For slightly over a year, I have largely put aside my longtime interests in the foundations of quantum mechanics and in particle physics, and have been working on dark matter. This interest came about in two different ways. The first was a paper on...

There was no turning back, once word leaked out that the Institute was looking for a home. . . . Veblen found the combination of the Bamberger fortune and the depressed land prices of the 1930s a potent mix. “There is no educational institution in the United States which has not in the beginning made the mistake of acquiring too little rather than too much land,” he wrote to Flexner.

The 2009 International Seminar on Mathematics Education, a program of the Institute for Advanced Study/Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI), brought together teams from Australia, Cambodia, Denmark, Israel, Namibia, Peru, Vietnam, and the United...

In this lecture, David Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, discusses how it became legal in the United States to engage in techniques such as water boarding by examining the role of lawyers in the Justice Department during the...

In The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, Princeton University Press, 2009), Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, uses ethnographic work on victims of...

Computational Intractability and Pseudorandomness

The areas of computational intractability and pseudorandomness have been among the most exciting scientific disciplines in the past decades, with remarkable achievements, challenges, and deep...

It was two generations ago that Bertrand Russell composed his single-sentence history of the world. “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple,” he wrote, “mankind has never refrained from any folly of which it was capable.” Experts were especially...

Western Biblical scholarship has existed as a historical enterprise independent from church and synagogue as far back as the eighteenth century. Western study of the Qurʾān, however, has more recent roots, with interest taking hold in the early...