Institute for Advanced Study

• 1. Introduction

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  The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey has hosted some of the most consequential minds of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein worked there. John von Neumann built one of the world's first modern computers in its basement. Kurt Gödel wandered its wooded grounds, wrestling with the deepest puzzles of mathematical logic. And yet the institute charges no tuition, grants no degrees, and assigns no research tasks whatsoever. How does a place like this come to exist? And what does it tell us about how knowledge actually advances?

• 2. Flexner's Gamble

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  Abraham Flexner received an unexpected phone call in the fall of 1929. Two representatives of the Bamberger siblings were on the line, asking how a considerable sum of money might best be put to use. Flexner had already made his name by exposing the sorry state of American medical education with his landmark 1910 Flexner Report, a study that reshaped how doctors were trained across the country. He had also, as far back as 1890, founded an experimental school with no curriculum, no exams, and no grades, and that school had proven remarkably effective at preparing students for the country's best colleges.

  Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld had earned a fortune through their Bamberger's department store in Newark, New Jersey, and they originally wanted to give back to the state by funding a dental school. Flexner persuaded them to aim for something more abstract. He envisioned an institute modeled on European centers he admired, places like Heidelberg University, All Souls College at Oxford, and the Collège de France, but planted on American soil. In his pitch to the Bambergers, he described a place where faculty and members alike would take what was already known as a given, and dedicate themselves entirely to pushing the frontiers further.

  The Bambergers came startlingly close to losing the money before a single scholar was hired. They had the foresight to pull their funds out of the market just before the Crash of 1929. The institute was formally founded in 1930, and the topologist Oswald Veblen, then at Princeton University, urged Flexner to site it near Princeton, close to an existing library and research culture. Veblen resigned from Princeton in 1932 to become the institute's first professor, and he selected most of the founding faculty himself.

• 3. Einstein and the Exodus

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  Albert Einstein was Flexner's first major recruitment, a coup that set the tone for everything that followed. The rise of fascism in Europe, and the antisemitism that came with it, was forcing the most talented scholars on the continent to seek refuge elsewhere. The IAS became the principal landing point for that wave of displaced intellect.

  Hermann Weyl was among those who fled. His wife was Jewish, and the threat was direct. Weyl agreed to join the institute on one condition: that it also appoint the Austrian-Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, then only thirty years old. Flexner agreed, and the institute gained two foundational figures in a single negotiation. Shortly after Einstein's arrival came James Alexander, described in the source as Veblen's brilliant student, and then Kurt Gödel, already recognized as a prodigy of logic. Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum physics pioneer, joined as a faculty member in 1935.

  By 1934, just a year after the institute formally opened, six of the most prominent mathematicians in the world were working under one roof. The shift was seismic enough that Princeton displaced Göttingen as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century. Göttingen had been the world's foremost mathematical hub; the IAS absorbed much of what it had been.

• 4. Freedom Without Obligation

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  In 1939, Flexner wrote an essay laying out the philosophy that drove every decision he had made. He pointed to James Clerk Maxwell, who pursued abstruse calculations in magnetism and electricity with no practical goal in mind, and whose purely theoretical work eventually became the foundation for the entire electrical development of modern times. Flexner cited Carl Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday, Paul Ehrlich, and Einstein in the same breath, and argued that the greatest scientific discoveries had been made by people driven not by usefulness but by curiosity alone.

  The institute was designed to protect that curiosity from interference. Faculty hold no classes because there are none to teach. No research is contracted or directed. Each scholar pursues their own questions at their own pace. At any given time, the IAS maintains a permanent faculty of twenty-eight academics appointed for life, who serve as the nucleus around which roughly 190 visiting members gather each year, drawn from more than a hundred universities worldwide.

  Richard Feynman, who spent time in Princeton in the 1940s, watched this arrangement from the outside and was not convinced. He described seeing great minds given every opportunity, sitting in a lovely house by the woods with no obligations, and producing nothing. In Feynman's account, the absence of challenge produced guilt and paralysis rather than discovery. His critique has never been fully answered by the institute's defenders, though the record of what its scholars have actually produced offers a partial rebuttal.

• 5. What the IAS Actually Built

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  Forty-two of the sixty-one Fields Medalists in mathematics have held some affiliation with the institute. Thirty-four Nobel Laureates have worked there. Of the sixteen Abel Prizes awarded since that prize was established in 2003, nine went to institute professors or visiting scholars. Thirty-nine of the fifty-six Cole Prizes awarded since 1928 have gone to scholars with IAS ties. These numbers, taken together, describe something more than prestige by association.

  John von Neumann's work at the IAS was not only theoretical. The IAS machine, built in the basement of Fuld Hall between 1942 and 1951 under von Neumann's direction, introduced the basic architecture that underlies most modern digital computers. Edward Witten, working at the institute, introduced M-theory in 1995, a generalization of string theory that has shaped theoretical physics research ever since. Robert Langlands, who now occupies Einstein's old office at the institute, introduced the Langlands program, an approach that connects geometry, mathematical analysis, and number theory in ways that researchers are still unpacking.

  The Special Year in 2012-13 on the Univalent Foundations of Mathematics brought together more than thirty researchers in topology, computer science, category theory, and mathematical logic. In less than half a year, they wrote a six-hundred-page book together. Andrej Bauer, one of the participants, described a spirit of collaboration unusual for mathematics, where researchers normally work alone. The book, informally called The HoTT book, was published by the institute in 2013 and made freely available online.

• 6. Exclusion and Access

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  The Bamberger siblings wrote to the institute's trustees on the 4th of June, 1930, laying down a foundational rule: no account shall be taken, directly or indirectly, of race, religion, or sex in appointments or admissions. They framed this as the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest.

  The principle collided immediately with the realities of the surrounding institution. When African-American mathematician William S. Claytor applied to the IAS in 1937, Princeton University informed the institute that it would not permit any colored person to attend. It was not until 1939, when the institute had moved into its own building at Fuld Hall and was no longer housed within Princeton, that Veblen was able to offer Claytor a position. Claytor turned it down on principle. The first African-American mathematician to visit the institute was David Blackwell in 1941.

  Women joined the IAS from its opening in 1933, but they faced persistent obstacles in building scientific careers. Emmy Noether and Anna Stafford Henriques were among the earliest women to study there. Hetty Goldman became the first woman professor at the institute in 1936, a distinction that remained unique until 1972. In 1945, Cheng-Shu Wang Chang became the first non-white woman to visit. The IAS's first African-American permanent faculty member joined in 2007. The School of Mathematics did not hire its first woman permanent faculty member until 2024.

• 7. A Model Exported

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  The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford opened in 1954 as the first institution explicitly modeled on the Princeton IAS. The National Humanities Center in North Carolina followed in 1978. Those two eventually became the core of a consortium called Some Institutes for Advanced Study, which now includes ten members across the United States, Europe, Israel, and South Africa.

  The reach of the Princeton model extended further still through individual scholars. In 1997, IAS professor Chen-Ning Yang helped the Chinese establish the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Princeton professors André Weil and Armand Borel helped establish connections with the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, founded in 1967 as part of the University of Madras. The Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, founded in 1958 just south of Paris, was shaped in significant part by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who served as IAS director from 1947 to 1966 and had a close relationship with its founder, Léon Motchane.

  The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, focused on theoretical physics, cosmic physics, and Celtic studies, was the second such institute in the world when it was founded in 1940. Robert Langlands, still working at the IAS in Einstein's old office, remains the living link between the institute's founding ambitions and whatever comes next in the Langlands program.