Institute for Advanced Study
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The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is a center for theoretical research. 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. Some of the best known scientists known for their work at the institute have been Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, John von Neumann, George Kennan and Hermann Weyl. There have subsequently been other Institutes of Advanced Study, which are based on a similar model.
The Institute has no formal links to Princeton University, or other educational institutions. However, since its founding, it has enjoyed close, collaborative ties with Princeton. It was founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld; the first Director was Abraham Flexner.
The Institute is divided into four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science, with a more recent program in systems biology. It consists of a permanent faculty of 27, and each year awards fellowships to 190 visiting Members, from over 100 universities and research institutions. The current Director is Dr. Peter Goddard
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[edit] The Schools
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.)
[edit] 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).
[edit] Directors
- Abraham Flexner was the institute's first director (1930–1939).
- Frank Aydelotte, the second director, (1939–1947).
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1947–1966).
- Carl Kaysen, (1966–1976).
- Harry Woolf, (1976–1987).
- Marvin L. Goldberger, (1987–1991).
- Phillip Griffiths, (1991–2003).
- Peter Goddard (2004–present).
[edit] 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.)
[edit] 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 of which is known as Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS).
[edit] 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)
[edit] External links
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