The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is a center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, designed and funded by the U.S. government, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Emmy Noether, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Michael Walzer, Clifford Geertz, Freeman Dyson and Kurt Gödel, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to the United States.
It was founded in 1930 by American educator Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Despite collaboration and neighboring geographic location, the institute is independent and has no formal ties to Princeton University. Having no students, the institute does not charge tuition or fees.Institute for Advanced Study: Frequently Asked Questions What is the relationship between the Institute and Princeton University?
Flexner's guiding principle in founding the institute was the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.Jogalekar. The faculty have no classes to teach. 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.Nevins pp. 45–46.Institute For Advanced Study Frees Scholar From Class, Tests, Students The Harvard Crimson, November 7, 1953 Established during the rise of fascism in Europe, the institute played a key role in the transfer of intellectual capital from Europe to America. It quickly earned its reputation as the pinnacle of academic and scientific life—a reputation it has retained.Reisz.Wittrock (1910).
The institute consists of four schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The institute also has a program in Systems Biology.
It is supported entirely by endowments, grants, and gifts. It is one of eight American mathematics institutes funded by the National Science Foundation.Arntzenius, Introduction p. iii. It is the model for all ten members of the consortium Some Institutes for Advanced Study.
History
Founding
The institute was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld.Flexner (1910).Bonner, p. 237. Flexner was interested 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.Abraham Flexner: his life and legacy by M. Saleem Seyal, MD, Hektoen International Journal: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Summer 2013
Flexner's study of medical schools, the 1910 Flexner Report, played a major role in the reform of medical education.Gunderman. Flexner had studied European schools such as Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the –and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States.Review of Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning in Times Higher Education, December 19, 2003: "his inspiration was All Souls College in Oxford"Flexner (1930), pp. 362–363.
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:Flexner (1960), p. 232.
The Bamberger siblings wanted to use the proceeds from the sale of their Bamberger's department store in Newark, New Jersey, to fund a dental school as an expression of gratitude to the state of New Jersey.Nasar, pp. 51–55. Flexner convinced them to put their money in the service of more abstract research.Axtell (2007). (There was a brush with near-disaster when the Bambergers pulled their money out of the market just before the Crash of 1929.)Nasar, p. 55.Villani p. 62-63. The eminent topologist Oswald VeblenFeuer, p. 98. 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.Bonner, pp. 247–248. 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.Leitch (1995).Documents located at Princeton University in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library: The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s , "Veblen was instrumental both in envisioning the Institute before the circumstances led to its creation as well as ... the initial selection of members for the Institute."
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.Villani p. 63. "After several years of patient negotiation the Bambergers succeeded in luring away the very best, one after another. Einstein came in 1933. Then Godel. Weyl. Von Neumann. And many more ... As the political climate in Europe became increasingly unbearable for Jewish scientists and their friends, the world's scientific center of gravity shifted from Germany to the United States." 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.Arntzenius, p. 8. 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.Nasar, p. 54.Grattan-Guinness, p. 1518-19. Flexner was fortunate in the luminaries he directly recruited but also in the people that they brought along with them.Nasar, p. 53. 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.Batterson. With the opening of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton replaced Göttingen as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century.Review of "Alan Turing: The Enigma" By James Case, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, March 2, 2015.
Early years For the six 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.Axtell, p. 95. Princeton University's science departments are less than two miles away and informal ties and collaboration between the two institutions occurred from the beginning.Leitch (1978). This helped start an incorrect impression that it was part of the university, one that has never been completely eradicated.Regis, p. 26.
On June 4, 1930, the Bambergers wrote as follows to the institute's trustees:Pais p. 64.
Bamberger's policy did not prevent racial discrimination by Princeton. When African-American mathematician William S. Claytor applied to the IAS in 1937, Princeton University said they "would not permit any colored person to go to the Institute for Advanced Study." In 1939, when the institute had moved into its own building, Veblen was able to offer Claytor a position; but Claytor turned it down on principle.William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive The first African-American mathematician to visit the IAS was David Blackwell in 1941, with another visiting the next year. Six Chinese physicists visited the IAS by 1949.
Women joined the IAS since its opening in 1933, and faced discrimination as they tried to pursue scientific careers. Emmy Noether and Anna Stafford Henriques were two of the earliest women to study at the IAS. The first and only woman professor at the IAS from 1936 until 1972 was Hetty Goldman, in the School of Humanistic Studies. In 1945, Cheng-Shu Wang Chang became the first non-white woman to visit the IAS.
Expansion
Flexner had successfully assembled a faculty of unrivaled prestigeBonner, From the first, an invitation to come to the institute was viewed as a mark of prestige. p. 256 in the School of Mathematics which officially opened in 1933. He sought to equal this success in the founding of schools of economics and humanities but this proved to be more difficult. The School of Humanistic Studies and the School of Economics and Politics were established in 1935. All three schools along with the office of the director moved into the newly built Fuld Hall in 1939.Institute for Advanced Study (1940), p. 3 (Ultimately the schools of Humanistic Studies and Economics and Politics were merged into the present day School of Historical Studies established in 1949.)Institute for Advanced Study (2010), p. 2 In the beginning, the School of Mathematics included physicists as well as mathematicians. A separate School of Natural Sciences was not established until 1966.Institute for Advanced Study (2013): IAS Bluebook, p. 16Batterson p. 142. The School of Social Science was founded in 1973.Institute for Advanced Study (2014), p. 42
Faculty representation continued to change throughout the 2000s. The IAS's first African-American permanent faculty member joined in 2007. In 2024, the School of Mathematics hired its first woman permanent faculty member.
Mission
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 as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday, Paul 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."Flexner (1939).
The IAS Bluebook says:
This was the belief which continues to inspire the institute today.
Impact
From the day it opened the IAS had a major impact on mathematics, physics, economic theory, and world affairs.Big Ideas: Big Thinkers: The faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study are changing the way we look at the world. Thirteen/WNET In mathematics forty-two out of sixty-one Fields Medalists have been affiliated with the institute.Fields Medal Winners Affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study as of August 2014 Thirty-four Nobel Laureates have worked at the IAS.Nobel Prize Winners affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study as of February 2012 Of the sixteen Abel Prizes awarded since the establishment of that award in 2003, nine were garnered by Institute professors or visiting scholars. Of the fifty-six Cole Prizes awarded since the establishment of that award in 1928, thirty-nine 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.