The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is a center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and Kurt Gödel, after their immigration to the United States. Other famous scholars who have worked at the institute include Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Edward Witten, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Julian Bigelow, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, George Kennan, Hermann Weyl, Stephen Smale, Atle Selberg, Clifford Geertz, Paul Erdős, Michael Atiyah, Erich Auerbach, Nima Arkani-Hamed, and Michael Walzer. There have subsequently been other Institutes of Advanced Study, which are based on a similar model.

Schools

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 two miles (3 km) 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.)

The Institute has four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science, with a more recent program in systems biology. It consists of a permanent faculty of 28, and each year awards fellowships to 190 visiting Members, from over 100 universities and research institutions. Individuals apply to become Members at the Institute, and each of the Schools have their own application procedures and deadlines. Members are selected by the Faculty of each School from more than 1,500 applicants, and come to the Institute for periods from one term to a few years, most staying for one year. All Members, whether emerging scholars or scientists at the beginning of their careers or established researchers, are selected on the basis of their outstanding achievements and promise.

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 market just before the Crash of 1929, and their original intent was to express their gratitude to the state of New Jersey through the founding of a medical 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. Growing anti-semitism at neighboring Princeton University also helped to convince the Bambergers (who, like Flexner, were Jewish) that an independent institute might serve a useful role. Indeed, many of the Institute's original faculty were Jewish, soon including prominent scholars fleeing Nazi Europe such as Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Hermann Weyl (whose wife was Jewish), and, later, André Weil.

Criticism

The Institute's founding premise, that individuals with lifetime tenure and no assigned duties will produce the most outstanding scholarship, is not universally shared. For example,

|Richard Hamming|You and Your Research, 1986}}

In 2000, the Institute sued in federal court, seeking to compel one of its tenured professors to resign on grounds of poor productivity (see Piet Hut). While this action may have been intended to counter views such as the above by demonstrating a corrective ability, it resulted in a wave of unfavorable publicity. The case was settled out of court, and Hut remained an Institute professor.

Directors

Abraham Flexner was the institute's first director (1930–1939)

Frank Aydelotte, the second director, (1939–1947)

J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1947–1966)

Carl Kaysen, (1966–1976)

Harry Woolf, (1976–1987)

Marvin L. Goldberger, (1987–1991)

Phillip Griffiths, (1991–2003)

Peter Goddard (2004–present)

Faculty

The Institute has been the workplace of some of the most renowned thinkers in the world, including Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Kurt Gödel, Clifford Geertz, T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, Freeman J. Dyson, Hassler Whitney, André Weil, Hermann Weyl, Harish-Chandra, Joan W. Scott, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten, Albert O. Hirschman,Nima Arkani-Hamed, and George F. Kennan. (For more, see List of faculty members at the Institute for Advanced Study.)

In addition to faculty, who have permanent appointments, scholars are appointed as "Members" of the Institute for a period of several months to several years. Some 190 members are now selected annually. This includes both younger and well-established natural scientists and social scientists. A Community of Scholars is a database of scholars and scientists affiliated with the Institute since its founding. While a basic listing of names and dates is publicly available, extended profiles are accessible to former Members, who can log in to update their own data and view more detailed information of their colleagues and/or other IAS-affiliated scholars.

References

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 Encyclopædia 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)

Joan Wallach Scott and Debra Keates, eds., ''Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. A collection of reflective pieces by former fellows at the Institute's School for Social Science.

''Institute for Advanced Study''(pdf file) (Institute for Advanced Study, 2005). An historical overview of the Institute, published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Institute and updated in 2009.

External links

Official site

Category:Education in Mercer County, New Jersey Category:Mathematical institutes Category:Research institutes in the United States Category:Princeton, New Jersey Category:Some Institutes for Advanced Study

ca:Institut d'Estudis Avançats de Princeton da:Institute for Advanced Study de:Institute for Advanced Study es:Institute for Advanced Study eo:Institute for Advanced Study fr:Institute for Advanced Study gl:Institute for Advanced Study ko:프린스턴 고등연구소 it:Institute for Advanced Study he:המכון למחקר מתקדם hu:Institute for Advanced Study nl:Institute for Advanced Study ja:プリンストン高等研究所 no:Institute for Advanced Study pl:Institute for Advanced Study pt:Instituto de Estudos Avançados de Princeton ru:Институт перспективных исследований sl:Inštitut za višji študij fi:Institute for Advanced Study sv:Institute for Advanced Study uk:Інститут перспективних досліджень vi:Viện nghiên cứu cao cấp Princeton zh:普林斯顿高等研究院

The Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS) consortium organizes ten "institutes for advanced study" founded on the same principles as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which is also one of the members.

Overview

SIAS members were founded explicitly to follow the Princeton model (with certain variations - not all maintain a permanent faculty, for instance), and place an emphasis on granting one-year fellowships. According to Wittrock (2003), the "like a traditional university it was devoted to the promotion of learning, but its scale was smaller and it did not offer formal instruction. Nor did it have large laboratories. It was to be a place for the most highly specialised research, yet provide an atmosphere open to intellectual exchange across all disciplinary boundaries".

The SIAS has stated several conditions any candidate institution should fulfil in order to be accepted as a new member: # "It should be a true place for advanced study in terms of a commitment to the highest standards of scholarship", # "It must offer a genuine and competitive fellowship programme - and, one may add, a programme where each individual candidate is subjected to a thorough assessment, not just accepted as part of a thematic group of scholars or selected by the convener of such a group", # "Its funding should be stable enough to ensure that it will continue to operate into the foreseeable future", and # "The institution should be part of the academic system but be independent and not be narrowly directed by any single university, or by any commercial enterprise or government department".

The SIAS members

The some members in the United States are:

Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford University. This is the next oldest member of the SIAS consortium. The Center is funded by the Ford Foundation, and was founded after World War II.It was independent, and is now part of Stanford University.

National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle in North Carolina;

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard;

Social Science Research Council

Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.

The European and Asian SIAS members (which also have been founded since 1970) are Collegium Budapest in Budapest, Hungary. Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, the Netherlands.

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, in Uppsala, Sweden;

Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria.

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in Berlin, Germany;

Institute for Advanced Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI) in Lugano, Switzerland.

References

External links

Björn Wittrock, ''Institutes for Advanced Study: Ideas, Histories, Rationales'' (pdf file)

Geoffrey G. Harpham, ''The National Humanities Center as an Institute for Advanced Study'' (pdf file)

he:מכונים אחדים למחקר מתקדם

Alain Supiot (born 1949) is a French legal scholar.

Biographical Elements/Career Highlights

Ph.D. (University of Bordeaux, France, 1979), Professor tenure (1980), member of the « Institut Universitaire de France » (2001, chair of « Dogmatic Grounds of Law and Social Ties »), Ph.D. honoris causa (University of Louvain, Belgium), Alain Supiot has successively been Professor at the University of Poitiers and Nantes, France (UMR-CNRS 6028). He created in Nantes the « Maison des sciences de l’Homme Ange Guépin » (Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences), and more recently the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is promoting cooperations between the North and the South in the field of Social Sciences. His career has been landmarked by several years spent in foreign Universities and Research Institutes (Institute of Industrial Relations, Berkeley, USA, 1981 ; Florence University Institute, Italy, 1989-1990 ; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany, 1997-1998). Member of the « Droit social » law review, he also authored numerous books focussing on labor law and social security law (among others : Critique du droit du travail, PUF, 1994) and participated to various collective works (among others : Le travail en perspective, LGDJ, 1998 ; Servir l’intérêt général, PUF, 2000 ; Beyond Employment. Changes in Work and the Future of Labour Law in Europe Oxford University Press, 2001, 245 p.). He has presided at the National Council for the Development of Human and Social Sciences (whose works have been published at PUF, Quadrige collection, 2001, under the title : « Pour une politique des sciences de l’Homme et de la société »). He seats at the scientific committee of the International Labour Review and at the administrative board of the Foundation « Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Paris ». His actual research interests focus of the analysis of the dogmatic foundations of social ties. His last published book is L'esprit de Philadelphie. La justice sociale face au marché total, Le Seuil, 2010, and his last published book in English is Homo Juridicus - On the Anthropological Function of the Law,Verso, New-York-London, 2007.

Main works published in English

See also

Work, Law, and Social Linkages,

International Labor Organisation "Voices on Social Justice"

Personal page (in French) at Nantes IAS site

References

Category:French jurists Category:Living people Category:Year of birth missing (living people)

de:Alain Supiot fr:Alain Supiot

Coordinates	59°13′″N39°54′″N
name	Edward Witten
birth date	August 26, 1951
birth place	Baltimore, Maryland
residence	Princeton, New Jersey
nationality	American
field	Theoretical physics Superstring Theory
work institution	Institute for Advanced StudyHarvard UniversityCalifornia Institute of TechnologyPrinceton University
alma mater	Brandeis University (B.A.) Princeton University (PhD)
doctoral advisor	David Gross
doctoral students	Jonathan Bagger Cumrun Vafa Steven Giddings Xiao-Gang Wen Eva Silverstein Shamit Kachru Sergei Gukov Mukund Rangamani Tamar Friedmann Peter Srvcek Christopher BeasleyDror Bar-Natan
known for	String theory M-theory Quantum Gravity Quantum Field TheorySupersymmetry
prizes	MacArthur Fellowship (1982) Dirac Medal (1985) Albert Einstein Award (1985) Fields Medal (1990)Henri Poincaré Prize (2006)Alan T. Waterman Award (1995) Nemmers Prize (2000) Henniemen Award (2004)Harvey Prize (2005)Crafoord Prize (2008)Lorentz Medal (2010)Isaac Newton Medal (2010)
spouse	Chiara Nappi
website	http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/
footnotes	}}

Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Witten is a leading researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics. He is regarded by some of his peers as one of the greatest living physicists, perhaps even a successor to Albert Einstein.

He has also made seminal contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics, which is the highest honor in mathematics and often regarded as the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics. He is the only physicist to have received this honor.

Birth and education

Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland to a Jewish family, the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity.

Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of '68), and went on to receive his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He planned to become a political journalist, and published articles in ''The New Republic'' and ''The Nation''. In 1968 Witten published an article in ''The Nation'' arguing that the New Left had no strategy. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.

Witten attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out. He then returned to academia, enrolling in applied mathematics at Princeton University before shifting departments and receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1976 under David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate in Physics. He held a fellowship at Harvard University (1976–77), was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–80), and held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).

Academic career

After completing his Ph.D., he worked at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow and at Princeton as a professor. He was a Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. He also was briefly at Caltech for two years from 1999 to 2001. He is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Witten has the highest ''h''-index (144) of any living physicist.

Research and seminal works

Witten has made extensive contributions to theoretical physics, in work that has spawned a large number of highly mathematical results. He has more than 350 publications primarily in quantum field theory and string theory and in related areas of topology and geometry. Witten is widely regarded by his peers to be one of the most important theoretical physicists in the last century. While it is difficult to categorize his deep and very influential work in certain terms, on the physics side Witten focuses on supersymmetry and on the mathematical side a lot of his work is on ideas of topology. Witten has shown through his various pioneering contributions that these things are related in a deep way at a fundamental level.

One of Witten's early contributions in physics is a natural solution to the so called hierarchy problem. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts a particle known as Higgs Boson. Its mass however seems much lighter than what the Model predicts. Witten has shown that the mechanism of broken supersymmetry offers a natural explanation to the hierarchy problem. In supersymmetry theory, the Witten Index tells whether supersymmetry is broken or not. Witten went on to make seminal contributions in supersymmetric gauge theories. Along with Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies Witten developed what is now known as Seiberg-Witten Theory which is related to Donaldson theory in mathematics.

Witten is clearly the leading figure in the development of string theory which is a leading candidate for the theory of all the forces in nature. Even as early as 1984, Witten worked on an important problem of gravitational anomaly which paved the way to what is known as the first string theory revolution. Also, with Gary Horowitz, Philip Candelas and Andy Strominger Witten showed how string theory can lead to realistic descriptions by compactifying the theory on a higher dimensional manifold known as Calabi Yau manifolds. In the string theory conference at University of Southern California in the mid-'90s, Witten dazzled the conference by solving a major outstanding problem of how five different versions of string theory were just the same theory which are related to one another by dualities. Also, Witten conjectured the existence of a unifying theory called M-theory whose complete structures had not been discovered yet and non-technically could be described as what could be possibly the most fundamental physical theory of the universe. Stephen Hawking, in his book ''The Grand Design'', wrote that M-theory may be the ultimate theory of the universe.

Edward Witten's other important contribution to physics was to a relatively recent result of gauge gravity duality. In 1997, Juan Maldacena formulated an important result establishing a relationship between gauge theories and a certain theory of gravity commonly known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This revolutionary discovery has dominated theoretical physics for the past 15 years and Witten's work following Maldacena's insight has shed extremely important light on this very important relationship. His many other contributions include a simplified proof of the positive energy theorem involving spinors in general relativity, his work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, his introduction of topological quantum field theory and related work on mirror symmetry, knot theory, twistor theory and D-branes and their intersections.

Witten was awarded the Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union in 1990, becoming the first physicist to win the prize. Sir Michael Atiyah said of Witten, "Although he is definitely a physicist, his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians... Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems... he has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics." One such example of his impact on pure mathematics is his framework for understanding the Jones polynomial using Chern–Simons theory. This had far reaching implications on low-dimensional topology and led to quantum invariants such as the Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants.

Witten has been described as "the most brilliant physicist of his generation", and "one of the world's greatest living physicists, perhaps even Einstein's successor". In 1995, he suggested the existence of M-theory at a conference at the University of Southern California and used it to explain a number of previously observed dualities sparking a flurry of new research in string theory called the second superstring revolution.

Personal life

Witten is married to Chiara Nappi, a professor of physics at Princeton University. They have two daughters, Ilana and Daniela, and one son, Raphael (Rafi), and a granddaughter Nava. His brother, Matt Witten, is a screenwriter and producer for several popular TV series including ''Law & Order'' and ''House''. Edward Witten serves on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now.

Awards and honors

Witten has been honored with numerous awards including a MacArthur Grant (1982), the Fields Medal (1990), the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2000), the National Medal of Science (2002), Pythagoras Award (2005), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2006), the Crafoord Prize (2008), the Lorentz Medal (2010) and the Isaac Newton Medal (2010). Pope Benedict XVI appointed Witten as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006). He also appeared in the list of ''TIME'' magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

See also

Gromov–Witten invariant

Hořava–Witten domain wall

M theory

Seiberg–Witten gauge theory

Seiberg–Witten invariant

Vafa–Witten theorem

Weinberg–Witten theorem

Wess–Zumino–Witten model

Witten index

References

External links

Faculty webpage

Publications on ArXiv

Witten theme tree on arxiv.org

Futurama episode information

Institute of Physics profile

Category:1951 births Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:Albert Einstein Medal recipients Category:American mathematicians Category:American physicists Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Brandeis University alumni Category:Fields Medalists Category:Harvard Fellows Category:Institute for Advanced Study faculty Category:ISI highly cited researchers Category:Jewish American scientists Category:Living people Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Category:National Medal of Science laureates Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Princeton University faculty Category:String theorists Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni

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Jin Xing (; born August 13, 1967 in Shenyang, Liaoning) is a ballerina, modern dancer, choreographer and actress from the People's Republic of China, and owner of the contemporary dance company "Shanghai Jin Xing Dance Theatre". Although usually credited as Jing Xing, the proper pinyin spelling is Jin Xing. She is one of the first few transgender women officially recognised by the Chinese government.

Born as a male to ethnic Korean parents, Jin studied in a local Korean elementary school. Her father worked in the police department. She was praised as highly intelligent, and had won abacus contests many times (Levey). She expressed high enthusiasm in dance performance. At the age of 9 she joined the People's Liberation Army to receive dance and military training (Levey; Li); she became a member of the military's dance troupe, and eventually attained the rank of colonel. She experienced strong transsexual desires early in life. She said she would stay outside during rain, and wish that a lightning strike would turn her body female (Levey). Later she won the national dance contest with a piece of Central Asian ethnic dance.

1987, Jin went to New York to study modern dance for four years, and then traveled and performed in Europe, and taught dance in Rome from 1991 to 1993, followed by a world tour, and returned to China at the age of 26 (Jin). She underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1996 (Li). Her left leg was paralyzed for a while after the surgery (Levey). After the recovery she went to Shanghai to choreograph and train students. At the age of 33 she adopted a son. She now lives with her three adopted children and her German husband in Shanghai.

Works

Jin Xing's works are "startlingly original and provocative" (Li). These include ''The Imperial Concubine Has Been Drunk for Ages'' (''Guifei zui jiu'', an adaptation of the famous Peking opera title) and ''Cross Border–Crossing the Line'' (''Cong dong dao xi'', a co-operation with British pianist Joanna MacGregor).

Her film debut was in the Korean movie ''Resurrection of the Little Match Girl'' in 2002. In 2005, she appeared in the Thai movie ''Tom-Yum-Goong'' as the villain Madam Rose. She later participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.

Quotes

(About Shanghai) "This city is a completely female city. Female town. Beijing is male. All rough and politics. Shanghai is more delicate. Money talks. Beautiful. I had enough rough. I need details. Specially because (I am) a lady. I need city."

"Some people complain about system: system is not good, they can't do anything. It's excuse. Freedom is in your heart."

"Until the last minute, I'm closing my eyes and saying goodbye to human life or I will continue to fantasize. It made me happy. That's my life: Fantasy."

Originally spoken in English. Roughly dictated from ''Colonel Jin Xing: A Unique Destiny''.

References

Li, Ruru. "Jin Xing." Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Routledge. 2005. ISBN 0-415-24129-4

External links

Documentary: "Colonel Jin Xing : A Unique Destiny" - Link does not work

Documentary: "Jin Xing : Shanghai Dancer"

Notes

Category:1967 births Category:Living people Category:Ballerinas Category:Chinese actors Category:Chinese ballet dancers Category:LGBT military personnel Category:LGBT people from the People's Republic of China Category:Modern dancers Category:People from Shenyang Category:Chinese people of Korean descent Category:Transgender and transsexual actors Category:Transgender and transsexual people

de:Jin Xing eo:Jin Xing fr:Jing Xing ko:김성 ru:Цзинь Син fi:Jin Xing zh:金星 (舞者)