Institute for Advanced Study
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The Institute for Advanced Study is a private institution in Princeton Township, New Jersey, U.S.A., designed to foster pure cutting-edge research by scientists and scholars in a variety of fields without the complications of teaching or funding, or the agendas of sponsorship. Although located nearby, it is not a part of Princeton University. The Institute is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein and John von Neumann 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.
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[edit] The School
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 Theoretical 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.)
[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 dental 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).
Frank Aydelotte was Director of the Institute from 1939-47, followed by J. Robert Oppenheimer who was Director 1947-66.
[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, 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 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)
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