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    A Community of Scholars: Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study
    A Community of Scholars: Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study
    A Community of Scholars: Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study
    Ebook127 pages53 minutes

    A Community of Scholars: Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study

    By Institute For Advanced Study, Michael Francis Atiyah, Chantal David and

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    The Institute for Advanced Study in essays and photos

    This beautifully illustrated anthology celebrates eighty years of history and intellectual inquiry at the Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research. Featuring essays by current and former faculty and members along with photographs by Serge J-F. Levy, the book captures the spirit of curiosity, freedom, and comradeship that is a hallmark of this unique community of scholars.

    Founded in 1930 in Princeton, New Jersey, the institute encourages and supports fundamental research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that can transform how we understand our world. Albert Einstein was among the first in a long line of brilliant thinkers to be affiliated with the institute. They include Kurt Gödel, George Kennan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, John von Neumann, and Hermann Weyl. This volume offers an intimate portrait in words and images of a storied institution that might best be described as a true academic village. The personal reflections collected here—written by leading figures from across the disciplines—bring this exceptional academic institution and its history vibrantly to life.

    The contributors to this anthology are Michael Atiyah, Chantal David, Freeman Dyson, Jane F. Fulcher, Peter Goddard, Barbara Kowalzig, Wolf Lepenies, Paul Moravec, Joan Wallach Scott, and David H. Weinberg.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 7, 2011
    ISBN9781400839797
    A Community of Scholars: Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study

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      Book preview

      A Community of Scholars - Institute For Advanced Study

      A Community of Scholars

      A Community of Scholars

      Impressions of the Institute for Advanced Study

      with photographs by Serge J-F. Levy

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      The Institute for Advanced Study gratefully acknowledges generous support for this book from Annette Merle-Smith and the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study.

      Text and collective work copyright © 2012 by the Institute for Advanced Study

      Full-page photographs copyright © 2012 by Serge J-F. Levy

      Jacket art: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, © Peter Bokor.

      Back jacket photo by Andrea Kane.

      Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press.

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2011931062

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Minion

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      Printed in Canada

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Contents

      A Paradise for Scholars? Peter Goddard

      The Institute for Advanced Study

      Eighty Years On Michael Atiyah

      Historical Times Barbara Kowalzig

      Warmth amid the Cold Chantal David

      Unusual Business Wolf Lepenies

      Essential Exchanges Jane F. Fulcher

      Looking for Leaders Freeman Dyson

      Shaping Time Paul Moravec

      The Interlocutors Joan Wallach Scott

      Night Owls and Early Birds David H. Weinberg

      Index of Photographs

      Biographies

      A Paradise for Scholars?

      Peter Goddard

      When, nearly eighty years ago on October 11, 1932, the New York Times announced the appointment of Albert Einstein to the embryonic Institute for Advanced Study, it reported that the founders’ intention was to establish a scholar’s paradise. A year later, when the Institute’s academic term had begun, the founding director, Abraham Flexner, wrote to Felix Frankfurter, one of the Institute’s trustees and later a Supreme Court Justice, that what had happened was not exactly what he had planned but was in fact much better than he had planned. I have frequently used the phrase, ‘paradise for scholars,’ without any very distinct notion of just how a paradise would be created, he wrote.

      The Institute opened with only a School of Mathematics, housed temporarily in the old Fine Hall of Princeton University. But it was a School of Mathematics whose faculty comprised Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, John von Neumann, and Hermann Weyl, as well as Einstein. They were joined by about twenty members and, Flexner commented, They have been turned loose in Fine Hall without any regulations whatsoever…. Every afternoon tea is served informally and there is, to my astonishment, an attendance of about sixty…. They talk mathematics but not only mathematics and drift in and out without explanation or ascertainable reason…. Inasmuch as our [members] have all been teachers working under a heavy routine for some years, they are as happy as birds, doing precisely the things which they have wanted to do.

      Perhaps curmudgeonly, Frankfurter felt the need to deflate Flexner’s exuberant rhetoric. NEWS FROM PARADISE—Not my style, he scrawled across Flexner’s letter. In his reply, he cautioned Flexner against thinking of the Institute as a paradise of scholars, explaining, the natural history of paradise is none too encouraging as a precedent. Apparently it was an excellent place for one person, but it was fatal even for two—or at least for two when the snake entered, and the snake seems to be an early and congenial companion of man…. Lets try to aim at something human, for we are dealing with humans and not with angels.

      While the Institute continues to be described regularly as an academic paradise, Flexner’s successors have surely been in no doubt that the Institute’s qualities are human rather than angelic. It is this humanity that is brought out fully in the essays and photographs that constitute this portrait of A Community of Scholars. The essays convey the insights and perspectives of scholars who, collectively, have known the Institute over seven of its eight decades. The photographs give a snapshot of one year, 2009–10, in the academic and social life of the Institute.

      Although the roll of its members has grown from the two dozen who gathered for tea in Fine Hall in 1933, to some seven thousand historians, mathematicians, natural scientists, and social scientists, whose work collectively has changed the way we understand the world, the essence of the Institute, its mission and character, has not changed. The community still gathers daily for tea, now in the Fuld Hall Common Room, still drifting in and out without explanation, but the cookies are now complemented by fresh fruit.

      Each year about two hundred visiting members, drawn from more than thirty countries, most accompanied by their families, join some twenty-eight permanent professors and fifteen professors emeriti to form the resident Institute community. Nearly all

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