Curated category
Princeton University faculty
- James M. McPhersonJames M. McPherson once said that a historian's job is to cut through the myths a people tell about itself, and get closer to reality.
- Andrew Fleming WestAndrew Fleming West spent much of his life fighting for something Princeton did not yet have: a residential home for its graduate students.
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war…
- David A. BellDavid Avrom Bell was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that thought seriously about ideas for a living. His father was the sociologist Daniel Bell.
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades trying to describe a dying star in plain language, and the best he could manage was "gravitationally completely…
- Roger SessionsRoger Huntington Sessions entered the world on the 28th of December 1896 in Brooklyn, New York. His family lineage traced back to Samuel Huntington, a…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Paul KrugmanPaul Krugman grew up in Merrick, a hamlet on Long Island, and traces his interest in economics not to a professor or a recession, but to science fiction.
- Arthur MendelArthur Mendel entered the world on the 6th of June 1905 in Boston. He grew up in a city rich with musical history before he ever stepped into a concert hall.
- Angus DeatonAngus Deaton was born on the 19th of October 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he grew up to become one of the economists whose work most fundamentally…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel…
- Oskar MorgensternOskar Morgenstern entered the world on the 24th of January 1902 in Görlitz, Prussian Province of Silesia. His mother was rumored to be a daughter of Emperor…
- Alfred EinsteinAlfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of…
- Peter Brown (historian)Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935. He is an Irish historian who reshaped how scholars think about an entire era.
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…
- Leopold InfeldLeopold Infeld, born on the 20th of August 1898 in Kraków, spent years working alongside Albert Einstein himself, yet he died without a Nobel Prize to his…
- Elliot ForbesElliot Forbes entered the world on the 20th of August 1917, into a family that defined Boston's cultural elite. His father Edward Forbes directed Harvard's…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little…
- Yves BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy was born on the 24th of June 1923 in Tours, and by the time he died in Paris on the 1st of July 2016, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr.
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract.
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…