The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey,
United States, is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to
encourage and support fundamental scholarship – the original, often speculative, thinking that produces advances in knowledge
that change the way we understand the world. It provides for the mentoring of younger scholars by Faculty, and it offers all who
work there the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the
sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute is a private, independent academic institution. It was founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, and established through the vision of founding
Director Abraham Flexner. Past Faculty have included Albert Einstein, who remained at the Institute until his death in 1955, and distinguished scientists and
scholars such as Kurt Gödel, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, George Placzek, Erwin
Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, John von
Neumann, George Kennan and Hermann Weyl.
Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science.
Currently, a permanent Faculty of twenty-seven eminent academics guides the work of the Schools and each year awards fellowships
to some 190 visiting Members, from about one hundred universities and research institutions throughout the world. Dr.
Peter Goddard is the current Director of the Institute.
The Institute has no formal links to other educational institutions. However, since its founding, it has enjoyed close,
collaborative ties with Princeton University and other nearby institutions. The
abundant natural beauty of the Institute’s 800-acre site, including the Institute Woods, farm fields, and wetlands, form a key
link in a network of green spaces in central New Jersey. These lands, the majority of which have been permanently conserved,
provide a tranquil environment for Institute scholars and members of the community.
The Institute is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein,
John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky after
their immigration to the United States. There are other Institutes of Advanced Study in
the U.S. and elsewhere which are based on the Princeton model.
The Schools
The Institute consists of a School of Historical Studies, a School of Mathematics, a School of Natural Sciences, a School of
Social Science, and a newly created program in Systems Biology. There is a small
permanent faculty for each school, supplemented by the visiting Members who are
selected for fellowships each year. One might discern a certain ideology behind such an
unusual collection of disciplines, although it is probably more accurate to say that the Institute has been distinguished more by
the strong personalities that have passed through it over the years than any particular "mission statement."
There are no degree programs or experimental facilities at the Institute, and research is funded by endowments, grants and
gifts — it does not support itself with tuition or fees. Research is never contracted or directed; it is left to each individual
researcher to pursue his or her own goals.
It is not part of any educational institution; however, the proximity of Princeton University (less than three miles from its
science departments to the Institute complex) means that informal ties are close and a large number of collaborations have arisen
over the years. (The Institute was actually housed within Princeton University—in the building since called Jones Hall, which was
then Princeton's mathematics department—for 6 years, from its opening in 1933, until Fuld Hall was finished and opened in 1939.
This helped start an incorrect impression that it was part of Princeton, one that has never been completely eradicated.)
History
The institute was founded in 1930 by Louis Bamberger
and Caroline Bamberger Fuld with the proceeds from their department store in Newark, New Jersey. The founding of the institute was fraught with brushes against near-disaster; the
Bamberger siblings pulled their money out of the stock market just before the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and their original intent was to express their
gratitude to the state of New Jersey through the founding of a medical school. It was the
intervention of their friend Dr. Abraham Flexner, the prominent education theorist, that
convinced them to put their money in the service of more abstract research.
Though it has been rumored that the institute was founded, explicitly, to house Jewish emigrees (including Einstein) whom
Princeton University refused to hire because of its institutional antisemitism, the statement is false. Even Princeton University
had Jews on its faculty then, including Solomon Lefschetz in mathematics. An early letter to the trustees from the founders,
Louis Bamberger and his sister, Carrie B. F. Fuld, spells out this ideal: "It is fundamental in our purpose, and our express
desire, that in the appointments to the staff and faculty as well as in the admission of workers and students, no account shall
be taken directly or indirectly, of race, religion, or sex" (p. 46). Though it is true that of the first appointments to the
fledgling institute, two went to famous Jewish refugees from Europe: Einstein and von Neumann, none of their four colleagues in
the School of Mathematics was Jewish: Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, Marston Morse, and Hermann Weyl (though Weyl was married to
a Jewish woman).
Directors
Faculty
The Institute has been home to some of the most renowned thinkers in the world, including Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Claude
Shannon, T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann,
Freeman J. Dyson, André Weil, Hermann Weyl, Harish-Chandra, Joan W. Scott, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten and George F. Kennan to name just a few of the
more widely known. (For more see List of faculty
members at the Institute for Advanced Study.)
Other Institutes for Advanced Study
There are numerous academic centres of varying status named as places for "Advanced Study" all over the world, but the
Princeton-based Institute is the original institution upon which was based the other members a select consortium known as
Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS).
Further reading
- Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein's Office: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study (Addison-Wesley,
Reading, 1987)
- Björn Wittrock, Institutes for Advanced Study: Ideas, Histories, Rationales (pdf file)
- Naomi Pasachoff, "Science's 'Intellectual Hotel': The Institute for Advanced Study," 1992 Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook
of Science and the Future, 472-488
- Steve Batterson, "Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study" (A. K.
Peters, Ltd., Wellesley, MA, 2006)
External links
Coordinates:
40°19′54″N, 74°40′04″W
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