organization:institute for advanced study

Freeman Dyson on How Robert Oppenheimer Ran Hot and Cold - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/freeman-dyson-on-how-robert-oppenheimer-ran-hot-and-cold

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Robert Oppenheimer could be extremely generous and friendly or he could be very harsh. He was very quick to judge and decide that somebody was no good, and then that was final.Photograph by Ed Westcott (U.S. Government photographer) / WikicommonsKai Bird is miffed. His 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer was exhaustively researched, but not quite to his satisfaction. Bird’s co-author, Michael J. Sherwin, had hit up Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, to open up about his time working with and under Oppenheimer, who, after having given birth to the atomic bomb, began directing the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. Dyson never let loose that he had a store of letters Bird and Sherwin could (...)

In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used To Be - Issue 24: Error
▻http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/in-mathematics-mistakes-arent-what-they-used-to-be

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Vladimir Voevodsky had no sooner sat himself down at the sparkling table, set for a dinner party at the illustrious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, than he overturned his empty wine glass, flipping bowl over stem and standing the glass on its rim—a signal to waiters that he would not be imbibing. He is not always so abstemious, but Voevodsky, that fall of 2013, was in the midst of some serious work. Founded in 1930, the Institute has been called “the earthly temple of mathematical and theoretical physics,” and is a hub for all manner of rigorous intellectual inquiry. Einstein’s old house is around the corner. In the parking lot a car sports a nerdy bumper sticker reading, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”—which might very well be aimed directly at Voevodsky. Because (...)

Meet the Father of Digital Life - Issue 14: Mutation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/meet-the-father-of-digital-life

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In 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other, Barricelli hovered over one of the world’s earliest and most influential computers, the IAS machine, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During the day the computer was used to make weather forecasting calculations; at night it was commandeered by the Los Alamos group to calculate ballistics for nuclear weaponry. Barricelli, a maverick mathematician, part Italian and part Norwegian, had finagled time on the computer to model the origins and evolution of life. Inside a simple red brick building at the northern corner of the Institute’s wooded wilds, Barricelli ran models of evolution on a digital (...)