The Mission of the IAS: Research Without Boundaries

The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner and intended to be a paradise for scholars, with no students or administrative duties. One of the institute’s first faculty members was Albert Einstein who got a position there in 1933 when he had to flee nazi Germany. In 2023 the IAS got some general ‘publicity’ in the movie Oppenheimer because Robert Oppenheimer became director of the IAS after the war and some key scenes from the movie take place on the Institute grounds. Robert Dijkgraaf, director until 2022 made the following remark about the mission of the IAS : ‘Flexner himself admitted that basic research would inevitably waste some money but that the successes would far outweigh the failures. There is no direct or predictable link between the quality of basic research and its effect. The time scales can be long, much longer than the four-year periods in which governments and corporations nowadays tend to think, let alone the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It can easily take many years, even decades, or sometimes, as in the case of Einstein’s theory of relativity, a century, for the full societal value of an idea to come to light.’