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The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is a center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry.

The Institute is a private, independent academic institution. It was founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, and established by founding Director Abraham Flexner. Past Faculty have included Albert Einstein, who remained at the Institute until his death in 1955, scientists and scholars such as Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, George Placzek, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, John von Neumann, George Kennan and Hermann Weyl.

Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science. Currently, a permanent Faculty of twenty-seven academics guides the work of the Schools and each year awards fellowships to some 190 visiting Members, from about one hundred universities and research institutions throughout the world. Dr. Peter Goddard is the current Director of the Institute.

The Institute has no formal links to other educational institutions. However, since its founding, it has enjoyed close, collaborative ties with Princeton University and other nearby institutions. The abundant natural beauty of the Institute’s 800-acre site, including the Institute Woods, farm fields, and wetlands, form a key link in a network of green spaces in central New Jersey. These lands, the majority of which have been permanently conserved, provide a tranquil environment for Institute scholars and members of the community.

The Institute is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky after their immigration to the United States. There are other Institutes of Advanced Study in the U.S. and elsewhere which are based on the Princeton model.

Contents 1 The Schools 2 History 3 Directors 4 Faculty 5 Other Institutes for Advanced Study 6 Further reading 7 External links

The Institute consists of a School of Historical Studies, a School of Mathematics, a School of Natural Sciences, a School of Social Science, and a newly created program in Systems Biology. There is a small permanent faculty for each school, supplemented by the visiting Members who are selected for fellowships each year. One might discern a certain ideology behind such an unusual collection of disciplines, although it is probably more accurate to say that the Institute has been distinguished more by the strong personalities that have passed through it over the years than any particular "mission statement."

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 three miles 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 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 stock market just before the Stock Market 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.

Though it has been rumored that the institute was founded, explicitly, to house Jewish emigrees (including Einstein) whom Princeton University refused to hire because of its institutional antisemitism, the statement is false. Even Princeton University had Jews on its faculty then, including Solomon Lefschetz in mathematics. An early letter to the trustees from the founders, Louis Bamberger and his sister, Carrie B. F. Fuld, spells out this ideal: "It is fundamental in our purpose, and our express desire, that in the appointments to the staff and faculty as well as in the admission of workers and students, no account shall be taken directly or indirectly, of race, religion, or sex" (p. 46). Though it is true that of the first appointments to the fledgling institute, two went to famous Jewish refugees from Europe: Einstein and von Neumann, none of their four colleagues in the School of Mathematics was Jewish: Oswald Veblen, James Alexander, Marston Morse, and Hermann Weyl (though Weyl was married to a Jewish woman).

• 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).

The Institute has been home to some of the most renowned thinkers in the world, including Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Claude Shannon, T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, Freeman J. Dyson, André Weil, Hermann Weyl, Harish-Chandra, Joan W. Scott, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten and George F. Kennan to name just a few of the more widely known. (For more see List of faculty members at the Institute for Advanced Study.)

There are numerous academic centres of varying status named as places for "Advanced Study" all over the world, but the Princeton-based Institute is the original institution upon which was based the other members, a select consortium of which is known as Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS).

• 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 Encyclopaedia 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)

• Official site
• Memories of the IAS on MemoryWiki

Coordinates: 40°19′54″N, 74°40′04″W