The story
Founded by Abraham Flexner, Caroline Bamberger Fuld and Louis Bamberger in 1930.1
Founding
The institute was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Flexner was interested in education generally, and as early as 1890 he had founded an experimental school which had no formal curriculum, exams, or grades. It was a great success at preparing students for prestigious colleges, and this same philosophy would later guide him in the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Flexner's study of medical schools, the 1910 Flexner Report, played a major role in the reform of medical education. Flexner had studied European schools such as Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Collège de France–and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States.
In his autobiography, Abraham Flexner reports a phone call which he received in the fall of 1929 from representatives of the Bamberger siblings that led to their partnership and the eventual founding of the IAS:
I was working quietly one day when the telephone rang and I was asked to see two gentlemen who wished to discuss with me the possible uses to which a considerable sum of money might be placed. At our interview, I informed them that my competency was limited to the education field and that in this field it seemed to me that the time was ripe for the creation in America of an institute in the field of general scholarship and science, resembling the Rockefeller Institute in the field of medicine—developed by my brother Simon—not a graduate school, training men in the known and to some extent in methods of research, but an institute where everyone—faculty and members—took for granted what was known and published, and in their individual ways, endeavored to advance the frontiers of knowledge.
The Bamberger siblings wanted to use the proceeds from the sale of their Bamberger's department store in Newark, New Jersey, to fund a dental school as an expression of gratitude to the state of New Jersey. Flexner convinced them to put their money in the service of more abstract research. (There was a brush with near-disaster when the Bambergers pulled their money out of the market just before the Crash of 1929.) The eminent topologist Oswald Veblen at Princeton University, who had long been trying to found a high-level research institute in mathematics, urged Flexner to locate the new institute near Princeton where it would be close to an existing center of learning and a world-class library. In 1932 Veblen resigned from Princeton and became the first professor in the new Institute for Advanced Study. He selected most of the original faculty and also helped the institute acquire land in Princeton for both the original facility and future expansion.
Flexner and Veblen set out to recruit the best mathematicians and physicists they could find. The rise of fascism and the associated anti-semitism forced many prominent mathematicians to flee Europe and some, such as Einstein and Hermann Weyl (whose wife was Jewish), found a home at the new institute. Weyl as a condition of accepting insisted that the institute also appoint the thirty-year-old Austrian-Hungarian polymath John von Neumann. Indeed, the IAS became the key lifeline for scholars fleeing Europe. Einstein was Flexner's first coup and shortly after that he was followed by Veblen's brilliant student James Alexander and the wunderkind of logic Kurt Gödel. Flexner was fortunate in the luminaries he directly recruited but also in the people that they brought along with them. Thus, by 1934 the fledgeling institute was led by six of the most prominent mathematicians in the world. In 1935 quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli became a faculty member. With the opening of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton replaced Göttingen as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century.
Early years
For the six years from its opening in 1933, until Fuld Hall was finished and opened in 1939, the institute was housed within Princeton University—in Fine Hall, which housed Princeton's mathematics department. Princeton University's science departments are less than two miles away and informal ties and collaboration between the two institutions occurred from the beginning. This helped start an incorrect impression that it was part of the university, one that has never been completely eradicated.
On June 4, 1930, the Bambergers wrote as follows to the institute's trustees:
Read the full text
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. We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.
Bamberger's policy did not prevent racial discrimination by Princeton. When African-American mathematician William S. Claytor applied to the IAS in 1937, Princeton University said they "would not permit any colored person to go to the Institute for Advanced Study." In 1939, when the institute had moved into its own building, Veblen was able to offer Claytor a position; but Claytor turned it down on principle. The first African-American mathematician to visit the IAS was David Blackwell in 1941, with another visiting the next year. Six Chinese physicists visited the IAS by 1949.
Women joined the IAS since its opening in 1933, and faced discrimination as they tried to pursue scientific careers. Emmy Noether and Anna Stafford Henriques were two of the earliest women to study at the IAS. The first and only woman professor at the IAS from 1936 until 1972 was Hetty Goldman, in the School of Humanistic Studies. In 1945, Cheng-Shu Wang Chang became the first non-white woman to visit the IAS.
Expansion
Flexner had successfully assembled a faculty of unrivaled prestige in the School of Mathematics which officially opened in 1933. He sought to equal this success in the founding of schools of economics and humanities but this proved to be more difficult. The School of Humanistic Studies and the School of Economics and Politics were established in 1935. All three schools along with the office of the director moved into the newly built Fuld Hall in 1939. (Ultimately the schools of Humanistic Studies and Economics and Politics were merged into the present day School of Historical Studies established in 1949.) In the beginning, the School of Mathematics included physicists as well as mathematicians. A separate School of Natural Sciences was not established until 1966. The School of Social Science was founded in 1973.
Faculty representation continued to change throughout the 2000s. The IAS's first African-American permanent faculty member joined in 2007. In 2024, the School of Mathematics hired its first woman permanent faculty member.
From Wikipedia’s article on Institute for Advanced Study, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5