Curated playlist
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. That belief runs through more than five decades of writing about the American Civil War. It helped earn…
- 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. The breakthrough came only after a stranger to the university, Isaac C. Wyman, died in 1910 and…
- 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 was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the…
- 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. His mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, was a literary critic and the sister of the…
- 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 collapsed object." Then, during a lecture in 1967, someone in the audience grew tired of…
- Roger SessionsRoger Sessions was born on the 28th of December, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant of Samuel Huntington, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. That genealogical link to the…
- 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 answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- 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. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- 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. Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, with their fictional science of "psychohistory"…
- Arthur MendelArthur Mendel finished his first scholarly edition of Bach's St. John Passion in 1951. Born in Boston on the 6th of June 1905, he was already in his mid-forties when that work appeared. He died of leukemia in Newark, New Jersey on the 14th…
- 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 changed how the world measures poverty and human welfare. In 2015, the Royal Swedish…
- 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 put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- 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 Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 despite never having taken a single economics…
- 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 Frederick III. He grew up in Vienna, Austria, where he attended university. The…
- 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 musicology and the sweeping ambition of popular history. He died on the 13th 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. He is widely credited with bringing coherence to the study of Late Antiquity, and many regard him as…
- 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 year, and a singular mission: to rescue Friedrich Nietzsche from decades of…
- 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 eventually celebrated a belated bar mitzvah at the age of sixty-seven. The same man…
- 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 name. He co-wrote a book with Einstein. He helped formulate equations describing how…
- 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 Fogg Art Museum while his mother was Margaret Laighton. This lineage placed him at…
- 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 that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- 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 him perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.…
- 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. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- 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 promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- 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. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- 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 it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…