Institute for Advanced Study

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Fuld Hall

The Institute for Advanced Study ( IAS ) is a private research institute founded in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1930 . The IAS is not part of the university system, even if its proximity to Princeton University leads to close informal links and collaborations. It is best known as Albert Einstein's last place of work and as a place of refuge for many other scientists who fled Germany. Gerhard Probst counts it, along with Roosevelt University , the University in Exile , Black Mountain College , and the Institute for Social Research, to the American higher education institutions that were most strongly influenced by emigrants.

History of the IAS

In 1930, Louis Bamberger (1855-1944), a businessman and philanthropist from Newark, New Jersey , and his twin sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld enabled the establishment of the institute with a donation of five million dollars. The donation was initially intended for the creation of a training center for dentists, but an educator friend, Abraham Flexner , persuaded her to donate the money to basic research . Flexner was the founding commissioner and first director of the IAS, from 1930 to 1939.

There are four departments, the School of Historical Studies , the School of Mathematics , the School of Natural Sciences, and the School of Social Science . Laboratories or facilities for experiments are not available. The four schools are currently run by a total of 26 permanent members. Every year the institute awards almost 200 scholarships to visiting scholars from all over the world.

An exception to the renunciation of experimental or engineering research was the time shortly after the Second World War, when a team led by institute member John von Neumann developed the IAS computer here , which, together with the reports published by Neumann, served as a role model in computer development worldwide.

The IAS as a model for other institutes

Following the example of the Institute for Advanced Study, further international research institutes were founded, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay and the IHES near Paris. In Germany, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld (now part of Bielefeld University), the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin have a similar concept, but the latter on a smaller scale and with a focus on the humanities. The Collegium Helveticum has existed in Switzerland since 1997 and is jointly supported by the ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts . In the USA, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University, founded in 1954, and the National Humanities Center for the humanities in Research Triangle Park (near Duke University , North Carolina ), founded in 1978, took the IAS as a model . The Korea Institute for Advanced Study founded in 1995 , the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASS, SCAS) founded in Uppsala in 1985 , the Israel Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem founded in 1975 (IIAS, at the Hebrew University ) and the 1970 The Netherland Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) founded in Wassenaar also followed the IAS model. At the Potsdam Nobel Laureate Symposium "Global Sustainability - A Nobel Cause" in October 2007, the establishment of a sustainability institute for climate and earth system based on the model of an institute for advanced studies was recommended. On February 2, 2009, in consultation with representatives of the German Research Foundation , the Leibniz and Helmholtz Association , the Fraunhofer and Max Planck Society , the Science Council and the German Rectors' Conference, the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies eV (IASS) was founded on the initiative of the Federal Ministry of Research .

Directors

See also

literature

  • Ed Regis: Who got Einstein's office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Simon & Schuster, London 1988, ISBN 0-671-69923-7 .
  • George Dyson : Turing's Cathedral. The origins of the digital age. Propylaea, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-549-07453-4 .
  • Gerhard Probst: Universities as places of activity for exiles. In: John M. Spalek (Ed.): Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur since 1933. Volume 2, Part 1, de Gruyter / Saur, Berlin / New York, 1989, ISBN 978-3-317-01159-4 , pp. 1446–1469 .
  • Britta Padberg: The Global Diversity of Institutes for Advanced Study. In: Sociologica. Volume 14, No. 1, 2020 ( online [accessed June 8, 2020]).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Probst: Universities as places of activity for exiles , p. 1446
  2. ^ Mission and History , at www.ias.edu, accessed March 16, 2014.
  3. ↑ Björn Wittrock, A brief history of Institutes of Advanced Study, pdf ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Wittrock is director of the SCASS.
  4. ^ Potsdam Memorandum .

Web links

Commons : Institute for Advanced Study  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 40 ° 19 ′ 53 ″  N , 74 ° 40 ′ 3 ″  W.