Institute for Advanced Study

This article is about the institute in Princeton, New Jersey. For other institutions with the same or similar names, see Institute for Advanced Study (disambiguation).

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Motto	Truth and Beauty
Type	Private
Established	1930
Endowment	$741 million (2014)
Director	Robbert Dijkgraaf
Location	Princeton , New Jersey , USA
Campus	Suburban
Website	ias.edu
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The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent, postdoctoral research center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry founded in 1930 by American educator Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld. The IAS is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, after their immigration to the United States. It is not part of any university or federal agency and does not charge tuition or fees.

Flexner's guiding principal in founding the Institute was the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. There are no degree programs or experimental facilities at the Institute. Research is never contracted or directed; it is left to each individual researcher to pursue their own goals. Established during the rise of European fascism, the IAS played a key role in the transfer of intellectual capital from Europe to America and soon acquired a reputation at the pinnacle of academic and scientific life–a reputation it has retained.

It is supported entirely by endowments, grants, and gifts and is one of the eight American mathematics institutes funded by the National Science Foundation. It is the model for the other eight members of the consortium Some Institutes for Advanced Study.

The institute consists of four schools–Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences; there is also a program in theoretical biology.

History

Abraham Flexner

Founding

The Institute was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Flexner is generally regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American medicine and played a major role in the reform of medical education. This led to an interest in education generally and as early as 1890 he had founded an experimental school which had no formal curriculum, exams, or grades. It was a great success at preparing students for prestigious colleges and this same philosophy would later guide him in the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study. Flexner, ever the education reformer, had studied European schools such as Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Collège de France–and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States.

In his autobiography Abraham Flexner reports a phone call which he received in the fall of 1929 from representatives of the Bamberger siblings that led to their partnership and the eventual founding of the IAS:

I was working quietly one day when the telephone rang and I was asked to see two gentlemen who wished to discuss with me the possible uses to which a considerable sum of money might be placed. At our interview, I informed them that my competency was limited to the education field and that in this field it seemed to me that the time was ripe for the creation in America of an institute in the field of general scholarship and science, resembling the Rockefeller Institute in the field of medicine—developed by my brother Simon—not a graduate school, training men in the known and to some extent in methods of research, but an institute where everyone—faculty and members—took for granted what was known and published, and in their individual ways, endeavored to advance the frontiers of knowledge.

The Bamberger siblings wanted to use the proceeds from the sale of their department store in Newark, New Jersey, to found a dental school as an expression of gratitude to the state of New Jersey. Flexner convinced them to put their money in the service of more abstract research. (There was a brush with near-disaster when the Bambergers pulled their money out of the market just before the Crash of 1929.) The eminent topologist Oswald Veblen at Princeton University, who had long been trying to found a high-level research institute in mathematics, urged Flexner to locate the new institute near Princeton where it would be close to an existing center of learning and a world-class library. In 1932 Veblen resigned from Princeton and became the first professor in the new Institute for Advanced Study. He selected most of the original faculty and also helped the Institute acquire land in Princeton for both the original facility and future expansion

left to right: Albert Einstein, Abraham Flexner, John R. Hardin, and Herbert Maass at the IAS on May 22, 1939

Flexner and Veblen set out to recruit the best mathematicians and physicists they could find. The rise of fascism and the associated anti-semitism forced many prominent mathematicians to flee Europe and some, such as Einstein and Hermann Weyl (whose wife was Jewish), found a home at the new institute. Weyl as a condition of accepting insisted that the Institute also appoint the thirty year old Austrian-Hungarian polymath John von Neumann. Indeed, the IAS became the key lifeline for scholars fleeing Europe. Einstein was Flexner's first coup and shortly after that he was followed by Veblen's brilliant student James Alexander and the wunderkind of logic Kurt Gödel. Flexner was fortunate in the luminaries he directly recruited but also in the people that they brought along with them. Thus, by 1934 the fledgeling institute was led by six of the most prominent mathematicians in the world. In 1935 quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli became a faculty member. With the opening of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton replaced Göttingen as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century.

Early years

One could argue that the creation of this institute and its unrivaled mathematical prestige was due to five individuals: Flexner who had an enlightened vision, the Bamberger siblings who provided the money to pay for it, Oswald Veblen who chose the Princeton location and recruited the original faculty, and Adolf Hitler who supplied that nonpareil faculty by driving scores of top intellectuals out of Europe.

For the 6 years from its opening in 1933, until Fuld Hall was finished and opened in 1939, the Institute was housed within Princeton University—in Fine Hall, which housed Princeton's mathematics department. Princeton University's science departments are less than two miles away and informal ties and collaboration between the two institutions occurred from the beginning. This helped start an incorrect impression that it was part of the University, one that has never been completely eradicated.

Purpose of the Institute

In a 1939 essay Flexner emphasized how James Clerk Maxwell, driven only by a desire to know, did abstruse calculations in the field of magnetism and electricity and that these investigations led in a direct line to the entire electrical development of modern times. Citing Maxwell and other theoretical scientists such Gauss, Faraday, Ehrlich and Einstein, Flexner said, "Throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which have ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind have been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity."

Fuld Hall

The IAS Bluebook says, "The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the few institutions in the world where the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is the ultimate raison d’être. Speculative research, the kind that is fundamental to the advancement of human understanding of the world of nature and of humanity, is not a product that can be made to order. Rather, like artistic creativity, it benefits from a special environment." This was the belief to which Abraham Flexner, the founding Director of the Institute, held passionately, and which continues to inspire the Institute today; Flexner wrote,

While practical benefits often result from pure academic research at the most fundamental level, such benefits are not guaranteed and cannot be predicted; nor need they be seen as the ultimate goal. Ventures into unknown territory inevitably involve an element of risk, and scientists and scholars are rarely motivated by the thought of an end product. Rather, they are moved by a creative curiosity that is the hallmark of academic inquiry.

Impact

Institute for Advanced Study Campus

From the day it opened the IAS had a major impact on mathematics, physics, economic theory, and world affairs. In mathematics forty-one out of fifty-seven Fields Medalists have been affiliated with the Institute. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates have been scientists working at the IAS. Of the sixteen Abel Prizes awarded since the establishment of that award in 2003, five were garnered by Institute scholars. Of the fifty-five Cole Prizes awarded since the establishment of that award in 1928, forty-two have gone to scholars associated with the IAS at some point in their career. IAS people have won 20 Wolf Prizes in mathematics and physics. Its more than 6,000 former members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world.

Pioneering work on the theory of the stored-program computer as laid down by Alan Turing was done at the IAS by John von Neumann, and the IAS machine built in the basement of the Fuld Hall from 1942 to 1951 under von Neumann's direction introduced the basic architecture of all modern digital computers. The IAS is the leading center of research in string theory and its generalization M-theory introduced by Edward Witten at the IAS in 1995. The Langlands program, a far-reaching approach which unites parts of geometry, mathematical analysis, and number theory was introduced by Robert Langlands, the mathematician who now occupies Albert Einstein's old office at the institute. To this day the IAS maintains a repository for the key papers of Robert Langlands and the Langlands program. The IAS is a main center of research for Homotopy type theory, a modern approach to the foundations of mathematics which is not based on classical set theory. A special year organized by Institute professor Vladimir Voevodsky and others resulted in a benchmark book in the subject which was published by the Institute in 2013.

The Institute is or has been the academic home of Michael Atiyah, Enrico Bombieri, Shiing-Shen Chern, Noam Chomsky, Paul Dirac, Freeman J. Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, Albert Hirschman, George F. Kennan, Tsung-Dao Lee, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Atle Selberg, Stephen Smale, John von Neumann, André Weil, Hermann Weyl, Frank Wilczek, Andrew Wiles, Edward Witten and Chen-Ning Yang.

Special Year Programs

Flexner’s vision of the kind of results that can emerge in an institution devoted to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is illustrated by the "Special Year" programs sponsored by the IAS School of Mathematics. For example, in 2012–13 researchers at the IAS school of mathematics held A Special Year on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics. Intuitionistic type theory was created by the Swedish logician Per Martin-Löf's in 1972 to serve as an alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics. The special year brought together researchers in topology, computer science, category theory, and mathematical logic with the goal of formalizing and extending this theory of foundations. The program was organized by Steve Awodey, Vladimir Voevodsky and Thierry Coquand, and resulted in a book being published in Homotopy type theory. The authors—more than 30 researchers ultimately contributed to the project—noted the essential contribution of the IAS saying,

Special thanks are due to the Institute for Advanced Study, without which this book would obviously never have come to be. It proved to be an ideal setting for the creation of this new branch of mathematics: stimulating, congenial, and supportive. May some trace of this unique atmosphere linger in the pages of this book, and in the future development of this new field of study.

— The Univalent Foundations Program, Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, April 2013

One of the researchers, Andrej Bauer said,

We are a group of two dozen mathematicians who wrote a 600 page book in less than half a year. This is quite amazing, since mathematicians do not normally work together in large groups. But more importantly, the spirit of collaboration that pervaded our group at the Institute for Advanced Study was truly amazing. We did not fragment. We talked, shared ideas, explained things to each other, and completely forgot who did what.

— Andrej Bauer, Mathematics and Computation, June 20, 2013

Other Institutes for Advanced Study

The IAS in Princeton is widely recognized as the world's first Institute for Advanced Study. It was a hard act to follow and it would be years before any similar institutions were founded. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford was the first such spinoff in 1954. This was followed by the National Humanities Center founded in North Carolina in 1978. These two institutions eventually became the core of a consortium known as Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS). Considered the Ivy League of advanced research institutes, the SIAS includes the original institute in Princeton and eight other institutes founded explicitly to emulate the model of the original IAS. These nine Institutes for Advanced Study are:

• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California
• National Humanities Center in North Carolina
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, the Netherlands
• Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden
• Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, Germany
• Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel
• Nantes Institute for Advanced Study Foundation in Nantes, France
• Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey

In recent years there have been other institutes loosely based on the Princeton original, in some cases established with help from IAS professors. In 1997 IAS professor Chen-Ning Yang helped the Chinese set up the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Freiburg, Germany was founded in 2007, with IAS director at the time Peter Goddard giving the inaugural address. Princeton IAS professors Andre Weil and Armand Borel helped to establish close contacts with the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, founded in 1967 as part of the University of Madras in India.

The prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) founded in 1958 just south of Paris is universally acknowledged to be the French counterpart of the IAS in Princeton. Princeton Institute director Robert Oppenheimer had a close relationship with IHÉS founder Léon Motchane and played a major role in helping to get it established.

Neither the Princeton IAS nor SIAS is connected with, and should not be confused with, the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Studies which comprises some twenty research institutes located throughout Great Britain and Ireland. The name Institute for Advanced Study, along with the acronym IAS, is also used by various other independent institutions throughout the world, some having little to do with the Princeton model. See Institute for Advanced Study (disambiguation) for a complete list.

Directors, faculty and members

Main article: List of faculty members at the Institute for Advanced Study

There is a permanent faculty of approximately thirty members, and each year fellowships are awarded to about 200 visiting members from over 100 universities and research institutions. Individuals apply to become Members at the Institute, and each of the Schools has its own application procedures and deadlines. Members are selected by the Faculty of each School from more than 1,500 applicants, and come to the Institute for periods from one term to a few years, most staying for one year. All Members, whether emerging scholars or scientists at the beginning of their careers or established researchers, are selected on the basis of their outstanding achievements and promise.

In addition to faculty, who have permanent appointments, scholars are appointed as "Members" of the Institute for a period of several months to several years. Some 190 members are now selected annually. This includes both younger and well-established natural scientists and social scientists. The "Community of Scholars" is a database of scholars and scientists affiliated with the Institute since its founding.

Directors of the IAS
Name	Term
Abraham Flexner	1930–1939
Frank Aydelotte	1939–1947
J. Robert Oppenheimer	1947–1966
Carl Kaysen	1966–1976
Harry Woolf	1976–1987
Marvin Leonard Goldberger	1987–1991
Phillip Griffiths	1991–2003
Peter Goddard	2004–2012
Robbert Dijkgraaf	2012–present

See also

• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study
• List of Fields medalists affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study
• List of Wolf Prize winners affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study
• Some Institutes for Advanced Study

Bibliography

• Arntzenius, Linda G (2011). Institute for Advanced Study, pub by Arcadia, Charleston, SC. ISBN 0738574090
• Axtell, James (2007). The Making of Princeton University : From Woodrow Wilson to the Present, Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691126860
• Batterson, Steve (2006). Pursuit of Genius : Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, A. K. Peters, Ltd., Wellesley, MA. ISBN 1568812590
• Bonner, Thomas Neville (2002). Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning, Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801871247
• Dyson, George (2012). Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, Pantheon Books, New York. ISBN 0375422773
• Edwards, Jon R. (2012). A History of Early Computing at Princeton, Princeton Turing Centennial Celebration, Princeton University, May 10–12, 2012
• Feuer, Lewis Samuel (1974). Einstein and the Generations of Science, Basic Books. ISBN 0465018718
• Flexner, Abraham (1910). Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Merrymount Press. OCLC 9795002
• Flexner, Abraham (1930). Universities : American, English, German, Oxford Univ. Press, New York, OCLC 238820218
• Flexner, Abraham (1939). The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, Harpers Magazine, Issue 179, June/November 1939
• Flexner, Abraham (1960). Abraham Flexner : An Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, New York. OCLC 14616573
• Frenkel, Edward (2015). Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, Basic Books, New York, ISBN 0465050743
• Grattan-Guinness, Ivor (2003). Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, volume 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801873975
• Gunderman, Richard B.; Gascoine, Kelly; Hafferty, Frederic W.; Kanter, Steven L. (2010). A "paradise for scholars": Flexner and the Institute for Advanced Study, Academic Medicine : Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, November 2010; 85(11): 1784-9
• Jogalekar, Ashutoshon (2013). Ich probiere: Revisiting Abraham Flexners dream of the useful pursuit of useless knowledge, Scientific American, December 12, 2013
• Leitch, Alexander (1978). The Institute for Advanced Study, in A Princeton Companion, Princeton University Press
• Leitch, Alexander (1995). Oswald Veblen, in A Princeton Companion, Princeton University Press
• Nasar, Sylvia (1998). A beautiful mind : a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Simon & Schuster, New York, ISBN 0684819066
• Nevins, Michael (2010). Abraham Flexner: A Flawed American Icon, iUniverse Inc., ISBN 1450260861
• Pasachoff, Naomi (1992). Science's 'Intellectual Hotel' : The Institute for Advanced Study, Encyclopædia Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future. ISBN 0852295499
• Regis, Ed (1987). Who Got Einstein's Office: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study, Addison-Wesley, Reading. ISBN 0201120658
• Scott, Joan Wallach & Keates, Debra, eds (2001). Schools of Thought : Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science, Princeton University Press. A collection of reflective pieces by former fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study School for Social Science. ISBN 0691088411
• Villani, Cédric (2015). Birth of a Theorem : A Mathematical Adventure, Faber and Faber. ISBN 0865477671
• Wittrock, Björn (1910). A brief history of institutes for advanced study

External links

• Official website
• Institute for Advanced Study(pdf file) (Institute for Advanced Study, 2005). An historical overview of the Institute, published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Institute and updated in 2009.