News

Why are some stars brighter than others? Why are some redder or bluer? A plot from a recent research paper by Hsiang-Chih Hwang, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, which addresses this question, has been selected as the Gaia Space Telescope's Image of the Week.

At a workshop held at IAS in March, Sebastian Mizera, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, "met with fellow S-matrix enthusiasts. Inspired by recent progress, they continue to seek more universal rules that govern all S-matrices. [...] They focus on observations, striving to discover truths that will endure even when the shape of future theories remains uncertain."

Jim Simons, former IAS Member (1972), Trustee (2001–18), and Board Vice Chair (2010–18), "led a life driven by curiosity." A tribute posted on the Simons Foundation website honors his achievements in mathematics, business, and philanthropy.

"In 1940, André Weil [Faculty (1958–76) and Emeritus (1976–98) in the School of Mathematics] wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field."

In an article for Quanta, Isabel Garcia Garcia, past Member in the School of Natural Sciences (2022–23), discusses the latent possibilities of LISA, the first dedicated space-based gravitational wave observatory, currently scheduled to launch in the 2030s.

A research team led by Adam Burrows, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has created the largest collection yet of state-of-the-art, three-dimensional core-collapse supernova simulations.

Agustin Moreno, past Member in the School of Mathematics (2021–23), in collaboration with an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has devised new tools for cataloging space orbits using symplectic geometry, helping to reunite two fields which have long since been growing apart. 

In the School of Mathematics, AMIAS Member Rachel Greenfeld and Veblen Research Instructor Sarah Peluse (2020–23), have proved that large sets of points with integer distances between them must lie almost entirely on a single line or circle. 

Past Member and frequent Visiting Professor Russell Impagliazzo, and collaborator with Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maas Professor in the School of Mathematics, discussed everything from cryptography to Dungeons & Dragons in an interview with Quanta Magazine. 

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, and her AI Democracy Projects co-founder Julia Angwin have penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about the "misleading" election information that abounds on many AI platforms.

A pair of astronomers, including Itai Linial, Member (2022–23) in the School of Natural Sciences, "have discovered a handful of supermassive black holes that are associated with bursts of X-rays that recur every few hours or days." 

In an op-ed for the Financial Times, Daniela Gabor, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., and Annette L. Nazareth Member in the School of Social Science, argues that the U.K.'s central bank strategy to unwind quantitative easing is an illegitimate use of its fiscal powers.

In an article for Foreign Affairs, Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, advocates for focusing on the possibilities that artificial intelligence might provide, as opposed to dwelling on its perils. 

Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science, spoke with The Nation about the multifront crisis of the post-Trump era, the moral and intellectual commitments of scholars and higher education, and her recent book Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber.

On the eve of Election Day, Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, and Maya Wiley have co-authored an op-ed for The Messenger, examining the present and future risks of AI to the democratic process and efforts to keep such technology in check.

Edward Witten, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, is the latest guest on the BBC podcast The Life Scientific. As well as discussing his career, Witten reflected on the "special place" of the Institute, describing the "stimulation" provided by his IAS colleagues.

In 1977, Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science, "updated the Augustinian theory on the legitimacy of armed conflicts from a secular and leftist point of view" with his book Just and Unjust Wars. In this interview, he addresses the moral dilemmas surrounding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Akshay Venkatesh, Robert & Luisa Fernholz Professor in the School of Mathematics, and past Members David Ben-Zvi and Yiannis Sakellaridis have made significant progress "on a long-held dream within a sweeping research initiative in mathematics called the Langlands program."

Princeton Mayor Mark Freda and IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg discuss the Institute's distinctive strengths, the continuing legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and other key figures from IAS history, and how the institution plays a role in making the small town of Princeton "punch far above its weight in terms of its intellectual place in the world."

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, and Anne-Claire Defossez, Visitor in the School, were invited to contribute an article to a special 200th anniversary edition of The Lancet on the subject of how border violence presents a public health concern.

To celebrate her latest book, Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science, spoke with EL PAÍS about the relevance of Max Weber today and how both knowledge and politics have been stricken by nihilistic boundary breakdowns and degradation of values.

In the wake of the revelation that over 2,000 objects have been stolen from the British Museum over a number of years, Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the implications that this theft has for the Museum's credibility as a repository of monuments.

Inspired by the release of Christoper Nolan's biopic Oppenheimer, this interview highlights the diverse research taking place across all four IAS schools and how the influence of leading figures from IAS history, such as Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, is still felt at the Institute today.

IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg "walks in Oppenheimer’s shoes." In an interview with NJ.com, he discusses how, in the current age of AI, the role for the Institute that Oppenheimer helped to carve out is needed "as much as ever."

Kai Bird sat down at the Institute for Advanced Study with CBS correspondent David Martin to talk about J. Robert Oppenheimer ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. 

IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg discusses how, after helping invent the atomic bomb, past Director J. Robert Oppenheimer spent decades thinking about how to preserve civilization from technological dangers, offering crucial lessons for the age of AI.

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, joined Washington Post Live for a conversation about artificial intelligence, the workforce, and the global economy.

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, writes for the New Statesman about the killing of Nahel Merzouk by a police officer and the social unrest resulting from it.

Jeffrey Gould, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Historical Studies, just returned from a trip to Chile and El Salvador, discusses recent political trends in Latin America.

On May 18, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kai Bird joined IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg to discuss the complex legacy of past IAS Director J. Robert Oppenheimer and reflect on the emotional impact of Christopher Nolan's upcoming film.

Four current IAS scholars in the School of Natural Sciences—Mikhail M. Ivanov, NASA Einstein Fellow; Giovanni Cabass, Bezos Member; Kazuyuki Akitsu, Member; and Oliver Philcox, a visiting graduate student—have published a paper linking invisible dark matter and "the cosmic web."

“'Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,' writes [past Member in the School of Social Science] Kristen Ghodsee."

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal, Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science and architect of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, explains how AI should be regulated as the unprecedented technology and the debates surrounding it develop.

"The architect of Biden's 'Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights' [Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science] Alondra Nelson talks to Christiane Amanpour about the threats and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence."

By Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science:

"In 1917 and 1919, at the invitation of University of Munich students, Max Weber delivered two public lectures, 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation.'"

Harel Shapira, past Member (2021–22) in the School of Social Science, provides a first-hand account of civilian firearms training.

By Alyssa Battistoni, current Member in the School of Social Science:

"When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law last August, it was celebrated as the biggest piece of federal climate legislation ever passed in the United States."

New research published by Lev Arzamasskiy, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and his collaborators, which include past Member (1999–2001) and Visitor (2005) Eliot Quatert, has provided "invaluable" insights into the basic plasma physics that occurs in astrophysical systems.

"For three days last April, the Institute for Advanced Study resembled its 1950s self. Actors wearing mid-century-appropriate clothing were spotted in and around Fuld Hall and Olden Manor, shooting scenes for a feature film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, famed theoretical physicist and Institute director from 1947 to 1966."

In 2014, Nathan Seiberg, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, "demonstrated that the most important symmetries of 20th-century physics could be extended more broadly to apply in quantum field theory, the basic theoretical framework in which physicists work today."

Four years ago, astronomers released the first ever image of a black hole. Now a subset of that team, led by IAS scholar Lia Medeiros, has used artificial intelligence to produce a vastly improved version of the image.

Christina Dunbar-Hester, current Member in the School of Social Science, discusses how industry and wildlife battle for their share of the Southern California coastline: "To protect human and animal life alike, we have to confront the zero-sum logic where goods movement crowds out space for flourishing life."

Grigory Kessel, past Member in the School of Historical Studies (2021–22), has played a key role in the rediscovery of a "hidden chapter" of Biblical text nearly 1,500 years after it was first written. 

"What does a public vision for A.I. actually look like? What do we as a society want from this technology, and how can we design policy to orient it in that direction? There are few people who have thought as deeply about those questions as Alondra Nelson." On this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the Institute's School of Social Science explores the A.I. policy challenge and more.

Emmy Murphy is a past Member and Visitor in the School of Mathematics, serving as a von Neumann fellow in 2019–20. In this Quanta interview, Murphy discusses geometric spaces and the spaces inhabited by mathematicians, as well as the inspiration that she draws from her namesake, past IAS Visitor Emmy Noether. 

An interview with Kristen Ghodsee, past Member in the School of Social Science (2006–07), on her new book Everyday Utopia.

By Eben Kirksey, past Member in the School of Social Science:

"Since James Watson and Francis Crick first described the structure of the DNA double helix, scientists have debated the potential for creating genetically modified babies."

"[Shafi] Goldwasser has worked to bring the same rigor to the study of vulnerabilities in machine learning algorithms. She teamed up with [Vinod] Vaikuntanathan and the postdoctoral researchers Michael Kim, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Or Zamir, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to study what kinds of backdoors are possible."

"Alondra Nelson stepped down last month from her role as leader of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Today’s editorial in Science highlights her accomplishments while she served in the Biden administration."

"To examine the special history of the region, I turned to Jeffrey Gould, who has known the area well as an activist, documentary filmmaker, and scholar since the 1970s."

As an educator, he worked to put architecture on an equal footing with other disciplines. As an architect, he was known for buildings at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

By Siobhan Roberts, frequent Director's Visitor:

"Lisanne Taams, a student at Radboud University in the Netherlands, is working on a Ph.D. about, in her words, 'computing motives of moduli stacks of vector bundles on stacky curves.'"

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, and the first woman of color to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) earlier in the Biden administration, is set to step down from her current post as a deputy director on February 10, 2023.

By Christina Dunbar-Hester, current Member in the School of Social Science:

"Ports in the Los Angeles region entered national headlines as a supply chain crisis unfurled during the pandemic. After an initial near-halt to commerce and shipping in early 2020, some of us saw bluer skies and enjoyed cleaner air for a fleeting moment."

By Alyssa Battistoni, current Member in the School of Social Science:

"When the multi-hyphenate scholar of science Bruno Latour died last October at the age of 75, tributes poured in from all corners of academia and many beyond. In the aughts, Latour had been a ubiquitous reference point for Anglophone social and cultural theory, standing alongside Judith Butler and Michel Foucault on the list of most cited academics in fields ranging from geography to art history."

By Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science: 

"[The Hamline case] is not an example of any tension between diversity and academic freedom, but of the confusion between fair treatment of minority students (respect and care for their well-being) and capitulation to religious censorship. The one does not require the other."

As part of a three episode series which aims to help improve understanding of liberalism, host Justin Kempf speaks with Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science. The podcast touches on Walzer's newest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective.

By David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor: 

"What counts as antisemitism? Is it on the rise, and if so, who’s to blame—the left or the right, Christians or Muslims? Or is it “the Jews” and their actions that are at fault, as some maintain. These questions may feel new, but the resurgence of antisemitism didn’t begin in 2022, and it’s not only happening in the U.S."

"It is a cliché to refer to the long economic boom in France that followed the Second World War—the three decades between 1945 and 1975—as les trente glorieuses. The phrase has no satisfying translation, though 'golden' hints at the éclat thrown off by the final adjective. Adopting this terminology for our ends, we might refer to the 1980s as Yve-Alain Bois’ décennie glorieuse."

By Hillary Angelo, current Member in the School of Social Science:

"Beatty, an old gold rush town in Nye County, Nevada, looks like a Wild West stage set. Burros, legacies of the region’s mining past, wander the streets. A century ago, it was a bustling three-railroad town. Today, it’s home to 854 people."

Angelos Chaniotis, current Faculty in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the significance of Pope Francis' recent decision to donate fragments of the Parthenon sculptures held by the Vatican to Greece, and looks at whether this serves as an example for the British Museum to take similar action.

"'Space-time is doomed,' says Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Arkani-Hamed has reached this conclusion over the past decade, as he's tried to gain a better understanding of what's happening inside the world's most powerful atom-smashers."

"'It’s easy to cover a floor with copies of squares, triangles or hexagons [...] but only in ways that never repeat. 'You want to understand the structure of such tilings,' said Rachel Greenfeld, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 'How crazy can they get?' Pretty crazy, it turns out."

"Alondra Nelson took the helm as interim director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy and helped President Joe Biden’s administration to develop key pieces of its science agenda, including its scientific-integrity policy and new guidance on open science."

By Director's Visitor Siobhan Roberts:

"Ms. Rosenkrantz and Mr. Louis-Rosenberg are algorithmic artists who make laser-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles — among other curios — at their design studio, Nervous System, in Palenville, N.Y. [...] The couple draw their creativity from many points around the compass: science, math, art and fuzzy zones between."

The Hidden Stories project, co-led by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, aims to explore the systems, peoples and cultures that make a book, including its physical and biological properties that reveal new knowledge. Everything from fungal growth on its pages to the trade routes involved in the materials used to make the book will be studied.

By Heba Gowayed, current Member in the School of Social Science, and Julie Dahlstrom: 

"Former President Donald Trump has made human trafficking central to his platform, pledging to mobilize the full force of the U.S. government to fight this 'epidemic,' a hard line he recently reiterated in a speech in Ohio."

By Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science:

"No one doubts that leaving, refusing to fight against Ukraine, is a good thing, a commendable act, but is it morally obligatory?"

"Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space."

"The idea, put forth by Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., hinted at something profound: that our universe could be a hologram. Much like a 3-D hologram emerges from the information encoded on a 2-D surface, our universe’s 4-D spacetime could be a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality."

"Earlier this year, a trio of mathematicians decided to make lemons into lemonade — and ended up making major headway on a problem that mathematicians have been thinking about for centuries."

By David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor: 

"Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet."

"Like many people who would go on to become mathematicians, Wei Ho grew up competing in math contests. In eighth grade, she won the Mathcounts state competition in Wisconsin, and her team took third place at nationals."

"This past September, 281 new and returning scholars and Faculty gathered for a new term welcome at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton."

"A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to—but distinct from—the Riemann hypothesis, which is considered one of the most important problems in mathematics."

Yale Law School Professor Amy Kapczynski and Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science, discuss the value of democracy, the role of the courts, and strategies for democratizing our political economy.

By Jennifer Lee, current Member in the School of Social Science: 

"Affirmative action is on trial again. This time, opponents of race-conscious college admission practices are claiming that Asian Americans are hurt by it. The plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which presented oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Monday, allege that Harvard holds Asian American applicants to higher academic standards and rates them lower than other students on personal characteristics, such as fit, courage and likability."

"The gas gobbled up by M87* and Sgr A* (the supermassive black holes at the centers of Messier 87 and the Milky Way), is likely a mix of hydrogen and helium with just a dash of heavier elements, but we don’t know its exact composition."

"David Nirenberg sees connections everywhere. As a professor of medieval history, he charted the relatedness of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought in different eras. As a dean at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he championed a program to promote collaborative ideas across the university."

By Siobhan Roberts, current Director's Visitor:

"In July, Chandler Davis, an American Canadian mathematician and human rights defender, delivered welcoming remarks at a panel for the 'Azat Miftakhov Days Against the War' in Ukraine from his hospital bed in Toronto, a vase of sunflowers by his side."

By Maira Hayat, current Member in the School of Social Science: 

"As Pakistan is enduring devastating floods and an ongoing humanitarian disaster — including decimated crops, more than 500 children dead, hospitals filled with malaria and dengue-infected people and millions of people displaced from their homes — its water infrastructure and management have come under increasing scrutiny.

"Francesca Trivellato is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She is the author, most recently, of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019).

By Andrea Sempértegui, Visitor (2021–22) in the School of Social Science:

"For eighteen days this June, thousands of Ecuadorians participated in a national strike that blocked highways across the country, paralyzed the capital city of Quito, and obstructed oil wells and mining sites from the northern Amazon to the southern Andes."

By Alyssa Battistoni, current Member in the School of Social Science:

"'No one wants to work anymore' was the surprise refrain of late 2021, posted on the doors of businesses forced to close for lack of staff and delightedly memed by a burgeoning anti-work crowd online."

"Widely separated binary systems take more than a thousand years to complete a single orbit, making it challenging to measure the eccentricity of an individual system. Instead, Hsiang-Chih Hwang used a statistical technique to study nearly a million binary systems at once."

"The Arts and Sciences used to share much of the same intellectual space. Only recently have they diverged to the degree that they seem diametrically opposed. The Exchange is our attempt to rekindle some of the dialogue that occurred between the two fields."

By Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science:

"In his recent essay in these pages on the vexed question of 'presentism' in the discipline of history, David Bell offers a soothing alternative to the American Historical Association president James Sweet’s clumsy dismissal of 'presentism' as a deviation from the true path of historical scholarship."

Research from IAS scholars, past and present, features prominently in the September 2022 issue of Scientific American. Past Director’s Visitor George Musser takes account of the recent groundbreaking work being done on the infamous black hole information paradox by researchers including Member Ahmed Almheiri, who authors his own essay on the solution to the paradox.

"The carried interest tax loophole allows wealthy Americans, like those in private equity and hedge funds, to avoid billions in taxes each year. It's been one of the most controversial features of the U.S. tax system, yet it has survived multiple attempts (by Republicans and Democrats) to try to kill the loophole. The most recent attempt — in the Inflation Reduction Act — was thwarted last week."

By Adriana Petryna, Member (2003–04) and Visitor (2006) in the School of Social Science:

"Already this year, both Colorado and New Mexico have seen the most destructive wildfires in their states’ histories. Colorado’s Marshall Fire consumed almost 1,100 homes in Boulder County. At a time when rooftops and lawns would normally have been covered with snow, drought had left the region dry and vulnerable instead."

"By the time he was 17, Mark Braverman had lived in three countries and spoke as many languages. But though he doesn’t have a hometown, he’s quick to call theoretical computer science his home."

"June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study."

"In 2013, one of the best—but also one of the worst—things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers."

By Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science: 

"Above all, Dobbs further entrenches states’ rights as a powerful weapon of minority rule in what we sloppily call the 'culture wars' today."

"In Particle Fever, theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed says on camera, 'I’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about the LHC.' Today, he’s still thinking about collider physics, but from different points of view.

By Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies: 

"According to an anecdote known in several variations, some people debate what would have changed in the history of the world if Khrushchev had been assassinated in 1963 instead of Kennedy. A well-known statesman gave a sharp response: 'Only one thing is certain: Onassis would not have married his widow.'"

"As Chris Hamilton (Institute for Advanced Study) explains in a recent research article, understanding the current orbits of binary stars in the Milky Way requires separating the effects of nature (the eccentricities that the binary systems are born with) and nurture (the outside gravitational effects of passing stars and the background galactic pull)."

"On Juneteenth, we think of Black Americans who descended from enslaved people who live today with wrongs we know, in many cases, how to set right. Our challenge as a policy office is how to do it at scale, across the entire Federal government, drawing on the talent of an increasingly inclusive and equitable research community."

By Siobhan Roberts, current Director's Visitor:

"Alyssa Blackburn, a data scientist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has spent several years performing digital detective work with her trusty lab assistant, Hail Mary, a shiny black computer with orange trim. She has been collecting and analyzing leaks from the Bitcoin blockchain, the immutable public ledger that has recorded all transactions since the cryptocurrency’s launch in January 2009."

"Last July, two mathematicians from Durham University, Will Hide and Michael Magee, confirmed the existence of a much sought-after sequence of surfaces: each more complicated than the last, ultimately becoming so intricately connected with themselves that they nearly reach the limits of what’s possible."

By Alex Kontorovich, Member (2009–10, 2013–14, 2016) and von Neumann Fellow (2017–18) in the School of Mathematics: 

"Not long ago, I was asked to explain the so-called Langlands program in a single tweet. Impossible, I immediately thought. It’s one of the biggest, most sweeping projects in mathematics, capable of connecting distant realms of research and, naturally, fiendishly difficult to describe."

"If an adversary gives you a machine learning model and secretly plants a malicious backdoor in it, what are the chances that you can discover it? Very little, according to a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study."

"Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and author renowned for his boundary-pushing investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, was honored Wednesday with this year’s prestigious Templeton Prize, awarded to individuals whose life’s work embodies a fusion of science and spirituality."

"The staff of Quanta Magazine, notably senior editor [and 2017 IAS Director's Visitor] Natalie Wolchover, have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing 'for coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research.'"

"For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations adhere to reality?"

"The halls of academia may appear to be overrun by battles over academic freedom, free speech, identity politics, cancel culture and overreaching wokeness. But why does it look that way? And what are the real causes? The influential political theorist Wendy Brown has spent her career studying the very ideas — those of identity, freedom and tolerance — that are central to current debates about what’s happening on college campuses across the country, as well as to the attacks they’re undergoing from within and without."

Joetha Collier, a young Black woman, was killed by a white man in 1971, near the Mississippi town where Emmett Till was murdered. Keisha N. Blain, Member in the School of Social Science, asks why isn’t her case known nationally today.

"For generations, science and tech have not spurred the same discussions about identity and racial and gender equity that other policy areas have. Now, though, as the lines between the digital world and the real world blur, the costs of ignoring...

By Jonathan Haslam, past George F. Kennan Professor (2015–21) in the School of Historical Studies:

"Are sanctions against Russia working? Two months on from the first targeting of Russian banks and oligarchs, Putin's grip on power remains as firm as ever. This shouldn't come as a surprise: restrictions on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea have impoverished their populations, but haven’t led to political revolutions."

"When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their 'expectation threshold' conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true."

"In a recent paper, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has settled an 85-year-old conjecture about one of math’s most ancient obsessions: the solutions to polynomial equations such as x2 – 3x + 2 = 0. 'It’s a great problem, famous old question,' said Andrew Granville, a professor at the University of Montreal. '[Bhargava] had an interesting, somewhat different approach, which was very creative.'"

"As theorists study black holes and other objects in AdS space, they keep learning Wheeler-esque lessons. One is that the connectivity of space — the ability to get from one place to another — seems to stem from particles on the boundary linked by correlations known as quantum entanglement."

"For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to 'blow up' some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a scenario in which those equations break down — a vortex that spins infinitely fast, perhaps, or a current that abruptly stops and starts, or a particle that whips past its neighbors infinitely quickly."

By Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science:

The French president’s first term, with his neoliberal and authoritarian policies, has situated him on the right of the political spectrum rather than in the center as he had announced prior to being elected. But his shift has progressively gone even further with the decision to put immigration control and hardline secularism on the agenda.

By Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies:

"For years the European Union has been confronted with visible threats to its cohesion: Brexit, populist anti-European rhetoric, the violations of democratic principles and corruption in former socialist countries, the widening economic gap between member-states, the different reactions to the refugee crisis and to climate change."

By Jonathan Haslam, past George F. Kennan Professor (2015–21) in the School of Historical Studies:

"Just a few weeks before Vladimir Putin launched what he intended as a two-day Blitzkrieg in Ukraine, taking by surprise even some of his inner circle, he met Xi Jinping for a summit in Beijing. It appeared to the world as if the Chinese might have been implicated in what is the foreign policy gamble of Putin’s political career."

"The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s, by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann–or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. This season, we peer into a fascinating moment in postwar America through the prism of Klári’s work. We explore the evolution of early computers, the vital role women played in early programming, and the inextricable connection between computing and war."

"Lillian Pierce vividly remembers a moment when she was 4 years old, waiting in her family’s station wagon for her older brother and sister to get out of school, magnolia trees forming pink and white arches overhead. Her mother was sitting in the driver’s seat, writing sequences of numbers in blue ink, balancing her checkbook. Pierce was mesmerized."

By Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science:

"'A conqueror,' wrote the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, 'is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed; in order to prevent this, we must choose to fight.' The crime of aggression is to force men and women to make that choice."

"Published in 2015, Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos was a major theoretical contribution to the study of neoliberalism. Since then, the neoliberal order has been rocked by a series of crises: among them the rise of right-wing, authoritarian regimes across the world; rapidly intensifying ecological devastation; and the COVID-19 pandemic that is now entering its third year."

"Within mathematics, there is a vast and ever expanding web of conjectures, theorems and ideas called the Langlands program. That program links seemingly disconnected subfields. It is such a force that some mathematicians say it—or some aspect of it—belongs in the esteemed ranks of the Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the top open questions in math. Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has even dubbed the Langlands program 'a Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics.'"

"The Ogallala aquifer, one of the earth’s largest, extends from South Dakota to Texas and, today, supports one-sixth of the world’s grain production, even as it is quickly being drained to the point of collapse. Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award, is a story about the politics and livelihoods that have sustained this extraction."

By Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies:

"The war in Ukraine has brought ghosts of the 20th century hovering over Europe: the leveling of cities by Russia, millions of Ukrainian refugees, the mass exodus of Russian dissidents to neighboring countries, the armaments race, and the risk of nuclear conflagration."

Sir John Huxtable Elliott, Professor in the School of Historical Studies from 1973–90, died at Oxford Hospital at age 91. He leaves a vast legacy of scholarship, beginning with his 1955 Ph.D. thesis, subsequently published under the title of The Revolt of the Catalans (1963).

"Just as there are von Neumann machines and von Neumann algebras, there are von Neumann anecdotes. Here’s a well-worn favorite. Late in the 1940s, years after he left Hungary for the United States and became a lionized mathematician, John von Neumann met a group of Rand Corporation scientists who wanted to use a computer he’d helped design."

By Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science:

"Condemnation has mostly been based on an entirely correct reading of international law. The Russian war is an unprovoked attack on a neighbor, an independent and sovereign state. It is clearly illegal. It is also, and this is more important, unjust."

By Adriana Petryna, past Member (2003–04) and Visitor (2006) in the School of Social Science:

"The Russian military’s capture of the Chernobyl nuclear facility in northern Ukraine last week led to heightened levels of both radioactivity and confusion. Since the infamous 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, which sent nuclear materials as high as five miles into the atmosphere and likely condemned far more people than the United Nations’ projected long-term death toll of 4,000, the plant has been radioactive. It’s defunct. Why would the Russian military want it?"

""Don’t let fear of getting sucked into a black hole keep you up at night, says Lia Medeiros, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study; you’d have to get really close for that to happen."

"In June, 1948, when I graduated from Princeton High School, I already had a job, as a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study, on the far side of town. All kinds of people assumed that the Institute was part of Princeton University, which it wasn’t and isn’t."

"I do not think that postmodernist and postcolonial analysis does away with metanarratives so much as demand a more searching scrutiny of their assumptions, implications and, in part, often concealed purposes."

"In this and other tales from the period, the color of the sultan’s skin has a deeper meaning: His black skin is a metaphor for his non-Christian soul, according to Cord Whitaker, associate professor of English at Wellesley College, a [M]ember of the Institute for Advanced Study, and one of the founding members of the Princeton collaboration."

"Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time—a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant."

By Minou Arjomand, current Visitor in the School of Social Science:

"On the last day of 1930, the pope promulgated the Casti Connubii encyclical which forbade Catholics from using contraceptives and reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s stance against abortion. Then, in February 1931, two doctors, Friedrich Wolf and Else Kienle, along with 300 of their patients, were charged with violating the abortion ban."

"In a paper posted in September, Paul Nelson of the Institute for Advanced Study has solved the subconvexity problem, a kind of lighter-weight version of Riemann’s question. The proof is a significant achievement on its own and teases the possibility that even greater discoveries related to prime numbers may be in store."

"Edward Witten has spent almost 50 years at the forefront of theoretical and mathematical physics. Here he describes how the LHC and other recent results have impacted his view on nature, and asks whether naturalness is still a useful guide for the field."

"Alondra Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, shares stories of inspiration discussing bell hooks' impact on Black feminism and looks ahead to her lasting influence."

Listen at WNYC.

"In a nearly 400-page paper posted in March, the mathematicians Mohammed Abouzaid and Andrew Blumberg of Columbia University have constructed a major extension of one of the biggest advances in geometry in recent decades."

On November 30, the far-right pundit Éric Zemmour announced that he would be candidate to the French presidential election. A journalist and polemicist, he was mostly known for his Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and sexist public statements.

"Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer loved young people. She loved to be around them and loved to work with them, emphasizing their vitality, vision, and ability to lead. Her approach to working with younger activists was grounded in the belief that age, education, and experience were not prerequisites to political leadership."

"Ana Caraiani was given a challenging problem from her adviser, the mathematician Andrew Wiles. He’d recently garnered fame for his 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but Caraiani had less luck with her assigned problem. Still, although she ended up making no significant headway, she remained undaunted."

"...maybe this paradigm of the usefulness of useless knowledge is what the Danish physicist Niels Bohr liked to call a “great truth” — a truth whose opposite is also a great truth. Maybe, as AI is demonstrating, knowledge can also flow uphill."

"Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created... In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created."

For "pioneering ways to find order hidden in complexity" and "laying the foundation for computer models that explore how human activity is changing global climate", Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi share the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"The Institute for Advanced Study doesn’t have any students or classes. There’s no regular daily agenda full of meetings and conferences. The scholars here don’t even have to research any specific topic. They could spend their whole day walking the grounds or sitting by the lake."

"It is sometimes called 'a scholar’s paradise' – the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton recently welcomed its latest group of 200 top-of-their field scholars from around the world. But despite all of the academics, one of the Institute’s most cherished and longstanding traditions is the 3 p.m. tea time. It is a chance for the members to mix and mingle and to bounce ideas off one another."

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, by Social Science Member Keisha N. Blain will be published by Beacon Press on October 5, 2021. The book explores Hamer's ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality.

"Can we imagine, as Samuel Moyn puts it in 'Humane,' his smart and provocative new book, 'a future of war beyond killing'? It sounds like a worthy goal. Why wouldn’t less killing be anything but better?"

Read book critic Jennifer Szalai's review at the New York Times.

By Samuel Moyn, Member (2008–09) in the School of Historical Studies:

"In a speech on Tuesday, President Biden identified his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan with his desire to end the “forever war.” But he also promised that America will...

By Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences:

"Steven Weinberg, who died on July 23, towered over theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century. He strongly believed that, armed only with the fundamental principles...

For Albert Einstein's 70th birthday, many of his Institute colleagues pitched in to purchase the music-loving physicist a high-fidelity radio.

"Nathan Seiberg, 64, still does a lot of the electrical work and even some of the plumbing around his house in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s an interest he developed as a kid growing up in Israel, where he tinkered with his car and built a radio.

'I...

"The Rockmore theorem made its first—and perhaps only—named appearance in print in 1977, in the journal Physics Letters, Volume 72B, No. 4. A photocopy of the journal page hung on my father’s office door, at Rutgers University, in New Jersey. The...

IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf and Professor Nati Seiberg speak with Quanta Magazine about Quantum Field Theory and consider what a complete mathematical understanding could mean to physics.

"In the 1950s, four decades before he won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to game theory and his story inspired the book and film “A Beautiful Mind,” the mathematician John Nash proved one of the most remarkable results in all of geometry. Among...

"In March 2003, science and technology historian George Dyson gave a typically entertaining TED talk about the creation of the modern computer, featuring characters ranging from Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century, to Joh...

"Sgr A*, the 4.6-million-solar-mass black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way, is normally a fairly quiet beast. The black hole slowly feeds on accreting material in the galactic center — but this food source is sparse, and Sgr A*’s...

By Nadia Zakamska, Member in the School of Natural Sciences:

"If you thought that the Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO discovery of stellar mass black hole mergers was cool, just think about the possibility of merging black holes with masses millions or...

By Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies:

"The fragments of the Parthenon sculptures that are exhibited in the British Museum have made headlines again, after an interview with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in...

NPR's Terry Gross interviews former IAS Member and current University of Chicago professor Reuben Jonathan Miller:

"[Miller] estimates that there are 45,000 "laws, policies and administrative sanctions" in the U.S. that target people with criminal...

By Nicholas Dirks, Member (1989–90) in the School of Social Science:

"When the sociologist Alondra Nelson was named as the new deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, she noted that the pandemic had 'held up a mirror to our...

IAS Trustee Mario Draghi, "who is credited with saving the euro, … will be tasked with guiding the country through the twin crises of the coronavirus and a crumbling economy. Draghi, who formerly served as the head of the European Central Bank, took the oath of office with support from across the political spectrum with all but one of Italy's major parties backing him."

"During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged that his administration would address inequality and racism. Now that he’s been sworn in as US president, his appointment of a prominent sociologist to the nation’s top science office is raising...

By James Stone, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences and Christopher McKee, SNS Member (1984, 89, 98):

"Star formation is of central importance in astrophysics. It leads not only to the diverse range of stars observed in the Universe, but...

"Within our galaxy, there are thousands of stars that orbit the center of the Milky Way at high velocities. On occasion, some of them pick up so much speed that they break free of our galaxy and become intergalactic objects. Because of the extreme...

"...Freeman Dyson had a lot of stories. One of my favorites was about how he decided to turn from studying mathematics to studying physics. As he told me in his “Math Life” interview, he was walking down the King’s Parade in Cambridge with a friend...

By Sara Seager, Member (1999–2002) in the School of Natural Sciences

"At its essence, astrophysics is the study of light. We know that there are stars other than the sun because we can see them shining. But light doesn’t just illuminate. Light...

By Donald W. Light, Visitor in the School of Social Science & Peter Doshi, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy:

"The colder months have arrived, and COVID-19 infections and deaths are rising once again—but Americans are breathing a sigh of...

Via Quanta Magazine:

The outline of Lauren Williams’s mathematical career was present very early on in her life.

“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved patterns,” said Williams. “I enjoyed being given a sequence of numbers and having to find...

"Tree growth rings and ice cores illuminate the climatic conditions of times gone by. When combined with historical records and documents, climate data can also shed light on important events in human history — including the activities of nomadic...

For Jelani Nelson, algorithms represent a wide-open playground. “The design space is just so broad that it’s fun to see what you can come up with,” he said.

Yet the algorithms Nelson devises obey real-world constraints — chief among them the fact...

Has physics reached the limits of what we can discover — or are the possibilities only just beginning? Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explores this question in his Quanta column.

By Avi Loeb, Member (1988–93, 2002–03) in the School of Natural Sciences:

“Such examples are often used to support the notion that the scientific method works and that the truth eventually prevails. But these success stories reflect a selection...

Donald Light, Visitor in the School of Social Science, asks in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"The British Medical Journal wrote last month that 'none of the [Covid] vaccine trials are designed to detect significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.' Can these vaccines stop the pandemic?"

By Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science:

"The recent terrorist attacks in France aroused what has become a predictable counter-attack by French politicians: the condemnation of Muslims as – in the words of the...

By Roland Betancourt, Member (2016–17) in the School of Historical Studies:

Ultimately, it is hard for me to explain from where this book began. Over the years, it becomes clear to me that I could not have not written this book, even if I had tried...

Via Deutsche Welle (DW):

Alice was a small, sweet, chubby woman with a 'dumpling figure,'" her granddaughter Karina Urbach told DW. The historian just published The Book Alice: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother's Cookbook. She remembers her...

By George Musser, Former Director's Visitor:

"In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole."

By Cord J. Whitaker, Member (2019–20) in the School of Historical Studies:

"The language of white supremacists is full of such chivalric references to duty and protection. It was as if the police were medieval romance damsels, classic Disney princesses, imperiled and in need of defending."

Stephen Adler, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, speaks with VICE News about a small, unexpected nudge experienced by spacecraft during planetary flybys.

The seemingly insignificant boost of a few millimeters per second was...

“By relying solely on preliminary results, one gets a falsely positive view of the vaccine. Surveys indicate that most people are worried that the government is going to allow untrustworthy COVID-19 vaccines on the market. Therefore, the public...