The Institute Letter Spring 2019

I think many of the people who are interested in congratulating me on the Abel Prize are doing so because I’m a woman and I’m the first woman to get it.

And I can’t help resist telling the story that actually it isn’t quite as unnerving as being...

On April 10, 2019, we were presented with the first-ever close-up image of a black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This remarkable technological achievement was made possible by the collective efforts of hundreds of astrophysics...

Conventional wisdom today says that the sciences—natural, physical, and even the quantitative social sciences like economics—are especially good for teaching effective truth practices. That is surely right to a degree. But just as much, we might...

You may have done this experiment as a child: spread a bunch of iron filings on a table, a heap of insouciant metal dust. Now place a bar magnet in their midst, and ah! The iron filings snap to attention, as if endowed with a sudden sense of purpose...

On November 22, five days into the gilets jaunes protests, with some 2,000 roads and roundabouts barricaded across the country and 280,000 demonstrators having taken to the streets in the major cities, Emmanuel Macron welcomed journalists from Le...

In 327–326 B.C.E., Alexander the Great, after having defeated the Persian King and conquered the Persian Empire, crossed eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and Bactria, testing the limits of his abilities. He attacked the fortress of Aornos, on Mount Pir...

"Multi-faceted gems, each with crystalline symmetry that gives them an unexpected mathematical beauty”—that is how the physicist Lance Dixon describes the mathematical objects used to predict what happens when nature’s fundamental particles scatter...

“From the perspective of gravity, [a black hole] is the simplest object we know of, no more than a hole in space. At the same time, according to quantum theory, it is the most complex object, the most compact way to store matter and information.” Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, discusses the paradoxical nature of black holes and their role in twenty-first-century physics.

On March 14, 2019, Albert Einstein's 140th birthday, the Institute for Advanced Study held the inaugural IAS Einstein Gala to honor trailblazing mathematician, investor, and philanthropist Jim Simons. The New York event, which raised $3.5 million to support basic research at IAS, was attended by more than 550 leaders from the worlds of business, philanthropy, technology, art, and academia, among them Ellen Futter, Larry Gagosian, Vartan Gregorian, Jeff Koons, Eric Schmidt, Diana Taylor, James and Merryl Tisch, and Sir James and Elaine Wolfensohn.

This article is a slightly edited excerpt from Francesca Trivellato's The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of Commercial Society. Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press...