Editing Institute for Advanced Study (section)

==History==

===Founding===
[[File:Picture of Abraham Flexner.jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[Abraham Flexner]]]]
[[File:LouisBamberger.jpg |thumb|upright|right|[[Louis Bamberger]]]]
[[File:CarolineBamberger.jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[Caroline Bamberger Fuld]]]]
[[File:OswaldVeblen1915.jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[Oswald Veblen]] ({{circa|1915}})]]

The institute was founded in 1930 by [[Abraham Flexner]], together with [[Philanthropy|philanthropists]] [[Louis Bamberger]] and [[Caroline Bamberger Fuld]].<ref>Flexner (1910).</ref><ref>Bonner, p. 237.</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www.hektoeninternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=162 Abraham Flexner: his life and legacy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160416021945/http://hektoeninternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=162 |date=April 16, 2016 }} by M. Saleem Seyal, MD, Hektoen International Journal: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Summer 2013</ref> 

Flexner's study of medical schools, the 1910 [[Flexner Report]], played a major role in the reform of medical education.<ref>Gunderman.</ref> Flexner had studied European schools such as [[Heidelberg University]], [[All Souls College, Oxford]], and the {{Lang|fr|[[Collège de France]]|italic=no}}–and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States.<ref>[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/hellcat-life-saver-survivor-and-one-man-quality-agency/185709.article Review of ''Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning''] in [[Times Higher Education]], December 19, 2003:  "his inspiration was All Souls College in Oxford"</ref><ref>Flexner (1930), pp. 362–363.</ref><ref name="freiburg" />

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:<ref>Flexner (1960), p. 232.</ref>

{{blockquote|text=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]].<ref>Nasar, pp. 51–55.</ref> Flexner convinced them to put their money in the service of more abstract research.<ref>Axtell (2007).</ref> (There was a brush with  near-disaster when the Bambergers pulled their money out of the market just before the [[Crash of 1929]].)<ref>Nasar, p. 55.</ref><ref>Villani p. 62-63.</ref> The eminent topologist [[Oswald Veblen]]<ref>Feuer, p. 98.</ref> 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.<ref>Bonner, pp. 247–248.</ref>  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.<ref name=Leitch1995>Leitch (1995).</ref><ref>[https://www.princeton.edu/mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pm06.htm Documents located at Princeton University in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library: The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170107121241/http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pm06.htm |date=January 7, 2017 }}, "Veblen was instrumental both in envisioning the Institute before the circumstances led to its creation as well as ... the initial selection of members for the Institute."</ref>

Flexner and Veblen set out to recruit the best mathematicians and physicists they could find.<ref name=Leitch1995/> The rise of [[fascism]] and the associated anti-semitism forced many prominent mathematicians to flee Europe and some, such as [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]] and [[Hermann Weyl]] (whose wife was [[Jews|Jewish]]), found a home at the new institute.<ref>Villani p. 63.  "After several years of patient negotiation the Bambergers succeeded in luring away the very best, one after another.  Einstein came in 1933.  Then Godel.  Weyl.  Von Neumann.   And many more&nbsp;... As the political climate in Europe became increasingly unbearable for Jewish scientists and their friends, the world's scientific center of gravity shifted from Germany to the United States."</ref> 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.<ref>Arntzenius, p. 8.</ref>  Einstein was Flexner's first coup and shortly after that he was followed by Veblen's brilliant student [[James Waddell Alexander II|James Alexander]] and the wunderkind of logic [[Kurt Gödel]].<ref>Nasar, p. 54.</ref><ref>Grattan-Guinness, p. 1518-19.</ref> Flexner was fortunate in the luminaries he directly recruited but also in the people that they brought along with them.<ref>Nasar, p. 53.</ref>  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.<ref>Batterson.</ref> With the opening of the Institute for Advanced Study,  [[Princeton, New Jersey|Princeton]] replaced [[University of Göttingen|Göttingen]] as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century.<ref name="Edwards"/><ref name=EnigmaReview>[https://sinews.siam.org/DetailsPage/tabid/607/ArticleID/414/Untangling-the-Threads-of-a-Heroic-and-Complicated-Life.aspx Review] of "[[Alan Turing: The Enigma]]" By James Case, [[Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics]], March 2, 2015.</ref>

===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.<ref>Axtell, p. 95.</ref> Princeton University's science departments are less than two miles away and informal ties and collaboration between the two institutions occurred from the beginning.<ref name=Leitch1978>Leitch (1978).</ref> This helped start an incorrect impression that it was part of the university, one that has never been completely eradicated.<ref>Regis, p. 26.</ref>

On June 4, 1930, the Bambergers wrote as follows to the institute's trustees:<ref>Pais p. 64.</ref>

{{blockquote|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."  It was not until 1939, when the institute had moved into its own building, that Veblen was able to offer Claytor a position; but this time Claytor turned it down on principle.<ref name=tutor>[http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Claytor.html William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor] at the [[MacTutor History of Mathematics archive]]</ref>

[[File:Albert Einstein and Abraham Flexner at the Institute for Advanced Study.jpg|thumb|left|260px|left to right: [[Albert Einstein]], [[Abraham Flexner]], [[John R. Hardin]], and [[Herbert Maass]] at the IAS on May 22, 1939]]

Flexner had successfully assembled a faculty of unrivaled prestige<ref>Bonner, From the first, an invitation to come to the institute was viewed as a mark of prestige.  p. 256</ref> 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.<ref>Institute for Advanced Study (1940), p. 3</ref> (Ultimately the schools of  Humanistic Studies and Economics  and Politics were merged into the present day School of Historical Studies established in 1949.)<ref>Institute for Advanced Study (2010), p. 2</ref> In the beginning, the School of Mathematics included physicists as well as mathematicians.  A separate School of Natural Sciences was not established until 1966.<ref>Institute for Advanced Study (2013): ''IAS Bluebook'', p. 16</ref><ref>Batterson p. 142.</ref> The School of Social Science was founded in 1973.<ref>Institute for Advanced Study (2014), p. 42</ref>
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