The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey.

It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Michael Walzer, Clifford Geertz and Kurt Gödel, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to the United States.

[14][15] 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.

[17] Flexner had studied European schools such as Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Collège de France–and he wanted to establish a similar advanced research center in the United States.

[18][19][20] 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:[21] 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.

[28] The rise of fascism and the associated anti-semitism forced many prominent mathematicians to flee Europe and some, such as Einstein and Hermann Weyl (whose wife was Jewish), found a home at the new institute.

[30] Weyl as a condition of accepting insisted that the institute also appoint the thirty-year-old Austrian-Hungarian polymath John von Neumann.

[31] 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.

[35] With the opening of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton replaced Göttingen as the leading center for mathematics in the twentieth century.

[39] On June 4, 1930, the Bambergers wrote as follows to the institute's trustees:[40] 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."

[7] Citing Maxwell and other theoretical scientists such as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday, Paul Ehrlich and Einstein, Flexner said, "Throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which have ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind have been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.

Rather, like artistic creativity, it benefits from a special environment.This was the belief to which Flexner clung passionately, and which continues to inspire the institute today.

[65] Among them are James Waddell Alexander II, Michael Atiyah, Enrico Bombieri, Shiing-Shen Chern, Pierre Deligne, Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, Albert Hirschman, George F. Kennan, Tsung-Dao Lee, Avishai Margalit, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Atle Selberg, John von Neumann, André Weil, Hermann Weyl, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten, Chen-Ning Yang and Shing-Tung Yau.

Flexner's vision of the kind of results that can emerge in an institution devoted to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is illustrated by the "Special Year" programs sponsored by the IAS School of Mathematics.

The program was organized by Steve Awodey, Thierry Coquand and Vladimir Voevodsky, and resulted in a book being published in homotopy type theory.

Among past and emeritus faculty professors are Danielle S. Allen, Clifford Geertz, Albert O. Hirschman, Eric S. Maskin, Dani Rodrik, Joan Wallach Scott, and Michael Walzer.

[70] Richard Feynman argued that the IAS does not offer real activity or challenge: When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever.

In 1997 IAS professor Chen-Ning Yang helped the Chinese set up the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

[20] Princeton IAS professors André Weil and Armand Borel helped to establish close contacts with the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, founded in 1967 as part of the University of Madras in India.

[76] The prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) founded in 1958 just south of Paris is universally acknowledged to be the French counterpart of the IAS in Princeton.

[77][78] Princeton Institute director Robert Oppenheimer had a close relationship with IHÉS founder Léon Motchane and played a major role in helping to get it established.

Furthermore, they direct research and serve as the nucleus of a larger and generally younger group of scholars, whom they have the power to select and invite.