The Institute Letter Fall 2019

In 2019–20, Chris J. Maddison, Member in the School of Mathematics and a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, is developing methods for machine learning and exploring foundational questions about how learning from data is possible.

James Peebles, Member (1977–78) and Visitor (1990–91, 1998–99) in the School of Natural Sciences, has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics (see his lecture above) for his “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe...

By the twentieth century, mathematics had advanced into rather abstract realms, transcending its origins, which had been largely driven by questions closer to the natural world. Physics on the other hand, especially after the development of quantum...

In 1989, Joanne Cohn, a physicist then at the Institute for Advanced Study, began distributing TeX files of string theory papers via email. By August of 1991, the email list had grown to 180 physicists—an unwieldy number for Cohn to individually...

In my lifetime, academic freedom has been repeatedly under threat. In the 1950s, in the McCarthy era, hundreds of teachers were interrogated about their political beliefs and summarily fired, whether or not those beliefs had anything to do with the...

In 2019–20, Cord J. Whitaker, Member in the School of Historical Studies and Associate Professor at Wellesley College, is interested in the history and development of race and racism in medieval English literature.

Like many Americans, my family and I were riveted by the Roots miniseries when it first aired in January 1977. I vividly recall sitting in front of the television with my mother, father, sister, and two brothers, watching the story of Alex Haley’s...

Originally published in 1971, Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the Institute’s School of Social Science, was republished by New York Review of Books in 2019. The following is Walzer’s...

A variety of systems in natural sciences are described through physically measurable quantities that depend on “independent variables.” For instance, we routinely measure the pressure and the temperature of the air in the Earth’s atmosphere, and...

In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person’s skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century English romance the King of Tars...

Lia Medeiros, a Member and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, is interested in using astronomical objects and phenomena to test fundamental theories of physics. She is a winner of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in...

To be bewildered is, literally, to be lost in the woods. Not lost in the beautiful and well-marked paths that wind through the Institute forest but trapped and disoriented in a dangerous place with the fear that you might never escape. The...

In the summer of 1968, a young, newly minted assistant professor moved from a postdoctoral position at Caltech to Princeton University. Schooled and trained over the previous seven years in the reductionist approaches of Watson and Cricks’ molecular...

As sociologists have reminded us, race, like power, is a relational concept. A so-called race is invariably defined in distinction to other presumed races. Where racial reasoning and the practice of comparison have combined in modern politics is in...

I spent part of my childhood living with my grandma just off Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. My school was on the same street as our house, but I still spent many a day trying to coax kids on my block to “play school” with me on my grandma’s huge...

There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom, and both spring from the same source—the infinite. —Baron von Leibniz

"During World War II, when von Neumann was...