Report for the academic year 1998 - The Institute Libraries - Institute ...

Institute for advanced study
new direction this year, with two programs of chamber music in November (with
guest artists The Stanford String Quartet) and January (with guest artists The St.
Lawrence String Quartet), and a solo piano concert in March. Robert Taub
completed his book on Beethoven and piano technique in December; it will be
published by Princeton University Press in 1999.
Karen Uhlenbeck was the Distinguished Visiting Professor this year in the
School of Mathematics. This program was begun in 1988 with the support of
the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and was designed with two objectives: to
define areas of concentrated activity in mathematics and to make it possible to
bring to the Institute a distinguished scholar with interests related to those
areas. Professor Uhlenbeck devoted her year at the Institute to exploring dif-
ferent viewpoints of geometric partial differential equations. Together with
School of Mathematics Faculty member Jean Bourgain, Professor Uhlenbeck led
a weekly seminar on geometric partial differential equations, focusing on bring-
ing together geometers with experts like Professor Bourgain in the analysis of
evolution equations. A second seminar which combined the analytic, algebra-
ic and geometric approaches to the theory of integral systems was organized with
the help of Chuu-Lian Terng, and as a third component, Professor Uhlenbeck
organized short courses in integrable systems and quantum field theory.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, six institutes for advanced study, three from the
United States and three from Europe, established the New Europe Prize as part of
an effort to build new intellectual resources in the former Soviet Bloc. The
Institute for Advanced Study has been very pleased to have been part of this
worthwhile endeavor. Over the past five years one or two annual prizes with
monetary awards have been presented to East European scholars who have
studied at one of the six participating institutes, and who are committed to
building independent centers for scholarship in their home countries. The 1997
New Europe Prize was awarded to Jan Strelau, Senior Professor in the Psychology
Department of Warsaw University, during a ceremony held at the Hague in
November. Professor Strelau supervises a small, active group of researchers who
deal with behavior-genetic studies. With the prize money Professor Strelau set
up the Interdisciplinary Center for Behavior-Genetic Research (ICBGR) for
Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Warsaw. The Center's aim is
to conduct behavior-genetic research and promote the development of behavior-
genetic paradigms in the fields of psychology, biology, education, and health
sciences. This area of research saw very little development during the commu-
nist era.
This was the second year of a three-year interdisciplinary program in mathL-mat-
ics and physics, led by Professor Pierre Deligne, School of Mathematics, and Professor
Edward Witten, School of Natural Sciences, and titled "Algebraic and
Geometric Aspects of Quantum Field Theory and Gauge Theory." The program
is evidence of a remarkable commitment to sustained and sophisticated interac-
tion on the part of participating mathematicians and physicists. Preliminary ver-
sions of the lecture notes from this ongoing series of meetings are available on the
Institute's website, and serve as a resource for the mathematics community worldwide.
The program is funded by the National Science Foundation, the J. Seward
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