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 –and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States. 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. 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: 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 ,
Abraham Flexner,
John R. Hardin, and
Herbert Maass at the IAS on May 22, 1939 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. ==Mission==