Videos at IAS
Many of the public lectures, conferences, seminars, and workshops that have been held at the Institute for Advanced Study are available for viewing on these pages. Selected talks are highlighted below, and you may also search for others by subject, School, or year via the side menu.
Quantum Beauty
Does the world embody beautiful ideas? This is a question that people have thought about for a long time. Pythagoras and Plato intuited that the world should embody beautiful ideas; Newton and Maxwell demonstrated how the world could embody beautiful ideas, in specific impressive cases. Finally in the twentieth century in modern physics, and especially in quantum physics, we find a definitive answer: Yes! The world does embody beautiful ideas. In this special lecture, Frank Wilczek presents the intellectual history of this question and discusses how esthetic considerations continue to guide our search for ultimate physical laws.
View more talks related to the School of Natural Sciences.
Up Close and Far Away: Artists, Memorialization, and Uganda’s Troubled Past
In the past ten years, the term “heritage” in African art studies has gone from being a cliché used only by cultural bureaucrats to a burgeoning academic growth industry, brought into being by studies of collective memory or national trauma in relation to both historical and invented pasts. In this lecture, Sidney Kasfir, Professor Emerita at Emory University, asserts that one of the important ways heritage is given substance as an idea is through memorialization, both through public monuments and smaller-scale artworks. In Buganda, a long-embattled African kingdom, these works of art and architecture give substance to memories of greatness, on the one hand, and victimhood, suffering, and loss, on the other.
View more talks related to the School of Historical Studies.
Beauty in Mathematics
Often mathematicians refer to a "beautiful" result or a "beautiful" proof. In this special lecture, Enrico Bombieri, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, addresses the question, "What is beauty in mathematics?"
View more talks related to the School of Mathematics.
The Lives of Others
In this Public Policy Lecture, Owen M. Fiss, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, examines the state of the constitutional rules protecting the privacy of telephone conversations. These rules were first announced by the Supreme Court in 1967, and then extended in 1972, but they are now greatly weakened. This turn of events is in part attributable to the general retrenchment of privacy rights that began in the mid-1970s and continues to this day. It is also linked to the events of September 11, 2001, which turned the fight against international terrorism into an urgent public issue and, Fiss argues, led to the compromise of fundamental principles of our constitutional order.
View more Public Policy Lectures. View more talks related to the School of Social Science.
The Frontiers and Limits of Science
Every day, at the Institute for Advanced Study and elsewhere, scientists and scholars are exploring the frontiers of knowledge, from the structure of the universe to the patterns of human thought. But what is the shortest path from A to B, if you do not know where B is? History teaches us that the first step is often a step sideways, away from the beaten path. Successful research is therefore an endless cycle of imagination and concentration, of playing and thinking. However, in a time that stimulates and rewards mostly short-term thinking and direct applications, the opportunity to freely explore such original ideas is getting more and more constrained. In this talk to the Friends of the Institute, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director of the Institute and Leon Levy Professor, argues that these limits to science devalue our society and hamper the long-term solutions of the world’s most pressing problems. A possible way out could be a broader understanding and appreciation of the fundamental values of the pursuit of knowledge, such as experimentation, imagination, reflection, criticism, and openness, in particular among younger generations.
View more talks related to the Friends of the Institute.