Report for the Academic Years 1987-1988 and 1988-1989

Institute for advanced study
Academic Activities of the Faculty Academic Years 1987-88 and 1988-89
During these two academic years Stephen l. adler's research fell into three prin-
cipal areas. His work on overrelaxation algorithms for Monte Carlo analysis had
its genesis in a paper he wrote in 1981; he returned to this set of problems, pub-
hshing a paper and speaking at conferences in Tallahassee and at Fermilab. His
work in the area of quatemionic quantum mechanics will produce a book in
which he details the quatemionic analogs of many of the results of standard non-
relativistic quantum mechanics. He also dealt with the problems involved in a
new approach to grand unification theory. During the academic year 1988-89
he taught the Intermediate Quantum Mechanics course at Princeton University.
Professor Adler received the 1988 J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical
Society "for his work in elucidating the consequences of chiral symmetry
through sum rules and low energy theorems."
JOHN n. bahcall's main activity dunng the academic years 1987-88 and 1988-89
was the writing of a book entided Neutrino Astrophysics. It was published by Cam-
bridge University Press in April 1989. The book summarizes the main achieve-
ments and the fijture challenges of the subject, as preparations for understanding
the new data that will be provided by experiments in progress.
freeman J. DYSON devoted most of his time during the period covered by this
report to work in pure mathematics and to reflecrions on broader aspects of sci-
ence and society. The work in mathematics was stimulated by the 100th
anniversary in 1987 of the birth of the great Indian scholar, Ramanujan, who
died in 1920 leaving interesting problems unsolved. Professor Dyson's work on
more general and public issues expressed itself in several lectures. These included
the Danz Lectures, given at the University of Washington in 1 988 under the
tide, "On Being the Right Size: Reflecrions on the Ecology of Scientific Pro-
jects," and a lecture at Yale University's Gibbs 150th Anniversary Symposium in
May 1989 on "Willard Gibbs and the Teaching of Science." His book, Infmite in
All Directions, won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and he was elected to
the status of Associe Etranger of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.
PIET HUT'S research has continued to focus on the interface between computer
science and astrophysics. Following contacts with an innovative company that
produces a parallel computer with more than 65,000 processors, he collaborated
with the company's scientists and colleagues from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Tokyo University to develop astrophysical software for parallel
computers. The immediate results have been published; in time this project
may lead to a new generation of computer codes capable of simulating the evo-
lution of dense stellar systems. A projected study of collisions between galaxies
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