Institute for Advanced Study in the context of André Joyal

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.

Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (Polish: [sta'ɲiswaf 'mart͡ɕin 'ulam]; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish and American mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved a number of theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski and Włodzimierz Stożek. In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish important results regarding ergodic theory. On 20 August 1939, he sailed for the United States for the last time with his 17-year-old brother Adam Ulam. He became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, and a United States citizen in 1941.

Abraham Pais (/peɪs/; May 19, 1918 – July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics. He was a physics professor at Rockefeller University until his retirement.

Angelos Chaniotis (Greek: Άγγελος Χανιώτης; born November 8, 1959) is a Greek historian and Classics scholar, known for original and wide-ranging research in the cultural, religious, legal and economic history of the Hellenistic period and the Byzantine Empire. His research interests also include the history of Crete and Greek epigraphy. Chaniotis is a Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and was a member of the Editorial Board of the Classical Studies journal Mnemosyne.

The Annals of Mathematics is a mathematical journal published every two months by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (/vaɪl/; German: [vaɪl]; 9 November 1885 – 8 December 1955) was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist, logician and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland, and then Princeton, New Jersey, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.

His research has had major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines such as number theory. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and an important member of the Institute for Advanced Study during its early years.

The Municipality of Princeton is a borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of which are now defunct. As of the 2020 United States census, the borough's population was 30,681, an increase of 2,109 (+7.4%) from the 2010 census combined count of 28,572. In the 2000 census, the two communities had a total population of 30,230, with 14,204 residents in the borough and 16,027 in the township.

Princeton was founded before the American Revolutionary War. The borough is the home of Princeton University, one of the world's most acclaimed research universities, which bears its name and moved to the community in 1756 from the educational institution's previous location in Newark. Although its association with the university is primarily what makes Princeton a college town, other important institutions in the area include the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton Theological Seminary, Opinion Research Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Siemens Corporate Research, SRI International, FMC Corporation, Educational Testing Service, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Amrep, Church and Dwight, Berlitz International, and Dow Jones & Company.

Clifford James Geertz (/ɡɜːrts/ ; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades ... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

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. The members are:

• Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States
• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, U.S.
• National Humanities Center in Durham County, North Carolina, U.S.
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
• Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden
• Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, Germany
• Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem
• Nantes Institute for Advanced Study Foundation in Nantes, France
• Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, South Africa

Ronald J. Mellor (born September 30, 1940) is a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His area of research has been ancient religion and Roman historiography, where he has published a number of books.

Mellor attended Regis High School in New York City. He received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1968. His previous teaching posts include Stanford University. He has been a Visiting Fellow/Scholar at University College, London, the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, the American Academy in Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Brian Conrad (born November 20, 1970) is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at Stanford University. Previously, he taught at the University of Michigan and at Columbia University.

Conrad and others proved the modularity theorem, also known as the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. He proved this in 1999 with Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, while holding a joint postdoctoral position at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

The Albert Einstein Professorship in Science is an endowed professorship in physics established at Princeton University in 1974 by a donation from the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM).

Albert Einstein was never on the faculty of Princeton University, although in the early 1930s he did occupy an office in Princeton University's mathematics building (the old Fine Hall), while he was waiting for the Institute for Advanced Study to be built. Einstein was given a corner office in the old Fine Hall, which served as the temporary headquarters of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions to string theory, topological quantum field theory, and various areas of mathematics. He is a professor emeritus in the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.

Michael Laban Walzer (born March 3, 1935) is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of the left-wing magazine Dissent, which he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University, an advisory editor of the Jewish journal Fathom, and sits on the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books.

He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, antisemitism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, Quillette, and many philosophical and political science journals.

The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University and IAS. The computer was built under his direction, starting in 1946 and finished in 1951.The general organization is called von Neumann architecture, even though it was both conceived and implemented by others. The computer is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History but is not currently on display.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an umbrella term used to group together the related technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It represents a broad and interconnected set of fields that are crucial for innovation and technological advancement. These disciplines are often grouped together because they share a common emphasis on critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills. The term is typically used in the context of education policy or curriculum choices in schools. It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns (as a shortage of STEM-educated citizens can reduce effectiveness in this area), and immigration policy, with regard to admitting foreign students and tech workers.

There is no universal agreement on which disciplines are included in STEM; in particular, whether or not the science in STEM includes social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. In the United States, these are typically included by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Labor's O*Net online database for job seekers, and the Department of Homeland Security. In the United Kingdom, the social sciences are categorized separately and are instead grouped with humanities and arts to form another counterpart acronym HASS (humanities, arts, and social sciences), rebranded in 2020 as SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy). Some sources also use HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) as the counterpart of STEM.

Robert Phelan Langlands, CC FRS FRSC (/ˈlæŋləndz/; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He is emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired.