G12-12126_IAS_SpringNL.qxp 4/19/12 12:13 PM Page 1 Th e Insti tute Letter InIstitute foAr AdvancedS Study Spring 2012 Dipesh Chakrabarty Appointed Professor Extrasolar Planets and the New Astronomy in School of Social Science BY ARISTOTLE SOCRATES ipesh Chakrabarty, a social historian whose re - Dsearch has transformed understanding of national - he desire to discover distant, rare, and strange ist and postcolonial historiographies, particularly in the Tobjects dominated twentieth-century astronomy, context of modern South Asia, has been appointed to for which increasingly larger and more sensitive the Faculty of the School of Social Science at the In - telescopes were constructed. stitute, with effect from July 1, 2013, succeeding Joan The act of carrying out this objective has brought Wallach Scott as Harold F. Linder Professor. Scott has enormous —and somewhat unbelievable—rewards: A S A served on the Faculty of the School since 1985, and will We now accept that we orbit a thermonuclear fur - N - V O become Professor Emerita from July 2013. nace, the Sun, whose physical properties are quite G S U - Chakrabarty is currently Lawrence A. Kimpton Dis - common, so common that there are nearly 100 bil - D P R A D M tinguished Service Professor in the Department of His - lion Sun-like stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way. U J Artist’s impression of a hot Jupiter, a A M tory and the Department of South Asian Languages It was discovered that the Milky Way was not, in type of extrasolar planet. Though hot A N O and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His fact, the entire Universe; the observable Universe is H Jupiters are similar in mass and compo - C O interdisciplinary analyses of the claims, procedures, of order many billions of light years across (that’s R sition to Jupiter, they can be over one Dipesh Chakrabarty and evolution of historical knowledge and its profound big), and there are of order 100 billion galaxies like hundred times closer to their stellar host, involvement with questions of nationalism, colonial our own floating around within it. In the center of orbiting about it once every few days. rule, modernization, economic and political development, and politics at large have these galaxies there happen to be super-massive placed him among the leading figures in the field. black holes whose masses can be up to 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. When these “Dipesh Chakrabarty is a historian of extraordinary range and depth whose work has enormous black holes are built up by in-falling gas, they are called “quasars,” and produce reshaped our understanding of colonial and postcolonial history,” said Peter Goddard, the equivalent of 100 trillion Suns worth of light within a volume comparable to our solar Director of the Institute. “His work, characterized by exceptional rigor, originality, and system. The greater the separation between any two galaxies or quasars, the greater the brilliance, has been widely influential. We look forward to his joining our community.” rate at which they move apart or, in other words, the Universe is expanding. Perhaps even “I am delighted and honored to have the opportunity to contribute to and share in the more surprising, the Universe is primarily made up of stuff that we can neither see nor feel, rich and innovative intellectual life of the Institute,” said Chakrabarty. “I look forward to i.e., dark energy and dark matter. The strategy of building bigger and more sensitive tele - being part of the academic conversations and interactions the IAS makes pos sible.” scopes, meanwhile, has produced a growing number of “smaller” results that continue to Regarded as one of the founders of a new comparative and transnational history, employ regiments of astronomers: gamma-ray bursts, pulsars, X-ray emitting binary stars, (Continued on page 13) (Continued on page 10) ‘An Artificially Created Universe’: The Electronic Computer Project at IAS BY GEORGE DYSON a single icon on a computer screen today. Von Neumann’s project was the physical real - I am thinking about something much more impor - ization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, a the - tant than bombs. I am thinking about computers. oretical construct invented in 1936. It was not the — John von Neumann, 1946 first computer. It was not even the second or third computer. It was, however, among the first compu- here are two kinds of creation myths: those ters to make full use of a high-speed random-access Twhere life arises out of the mud, and those storage matrix, and became the machine whose where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, coding was most widely replicated and whose logi - computers arose from the mud, and code fell from cal architecture was most widely reproduced. The the sky. stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan In late 1945, at the Institute for Advanced Study Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke in Princeton, New Jersey, Hungarian-American Y the distinction between numbers that mean things D U T mathematician John von Neumann gathered a small S and numbers that do things. Our universe would D E C group of engineers to begin designing, building, and N never be the same. A V programming an electronic digital computer, with D Working outside the bounds of industry, break - A R O five kilobytes of storage, whose attention could be F ing the rules of academia, and relying largely on the E T U switched in 24 microseconds from one memory T U.S. government for support, a dozen engineers in I T S N location to the next. The entire digital universe I their twenties and thirties designed and built von can be traced directly to this 32-by-32-by-40-bit Diagram of the graphing power supply of the Electronic Computer Project, 1955 Neumann’s computer for less than $1 million in nucleus: less memory than is allocated to displaying (Continued on page 8) Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 www.ias.edu G12-12126_IAS_SpringNL.qxp 4/19/12 12:13 PM Page 2 News of the Institute Community IDIER FASSIN , James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the ophy at Harvard University. Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer connections with society, education, politics, and the media. DSchool of Social Science, has published La Force de l’Or - University Professor at Harvard and Director of the Harvard Dijkgraaf is currently President of the Royal Netherlands dre: Une Anthropologie de la Police des Quartiers (Le Seuil, 2011). University Library. Ruiz is Distinguished Professor of History Academy of Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Univer - The book provides the first ethnography of the police in at the University of California, Los Angeles. sity Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of France and sheds light on contemporary politics of security. q Amsterdam. q AUL MORAVEC, former Artist-in-Residence (2007 –08) q ETER SARNAK , Professor in the School of Mathemat - Pand Artistic Consultant (2008 –09), is one of four com - JÖRN ENGQUIST , former Member (1991–92) in the Pics, has been awarded the Mahler Lectureship by the posers to be awarded the 2012 Arts and Letters Award in BSchool of Mathematics, has received the George David Australian Mathematical Society. He was honored for “major Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics, awarded jointly by contributions to number theory and to questions in analysis q the American Mathematical Society and the Society for In - motivated by number theory.” he Federalist Society has awarded its Paul M. Bator dustrial and Applied Mathematics. The award recognized q Award for excellence in legal scholarship, teaching, and Engquist’s contribution to a wide range of powerful compu- T tational methods. He holds the Computational and Applied REEMAN J. DYSON , Professor Emeritus in the School public impact, to EUGENE KONTOROVICH , Member in Mathematics Chair I at the University of Texas at Austin. Fof Natural Sciences, has been elected as a Foreign Mem - the School of Social Science. ber of the Russian Academy of Sciences. q q q ASHID SUNYAEV , the Maureen and John Hendricks OMAN HOLOWINSKY , former Member (2006–07, 2009–10) in the School of Mathematics, has been he 2012 Wolf Prize in Mathematics has been awarded Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at R R awarded the 2011 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. The prize ci - to LUIS CAFFARELLI , former Professor (1986–96) the Institute, has won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in T tation recognized Holowinsky’s work in analytic theory and and Member (2009) in the School of Mathematics, for his Physics. Sunyaev was recognized for his contributions to the theory of modular forms, including work done with former work on partial differential equations , and to MICHAEL understanding of the early universe and the properties of School of Mathematics Members Valentin Blomer (2009) ASCHBACHER , former Member (1978–79) in the School of black holes. He is Director of the Max Planck Institute for and Kannan Soundararajan (1999–2000, 2009), who is a Mathematics, for his work on the theory of finite groups. Caf - Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and Chief Scientist at previous recipient of the prize. Holowinsky is Assistant Pro - farelli is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas the Russian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute. fessor at the Ohio State University. at Austin. Aschbacher is the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Profes - q q sor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. he Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition was q awarded to former School of Mathematics Members LRICH LEHNER , former Member (2009) in the T School of Historical Studies, has received the American he National Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2012 MICHAEL ASCHBACHER (1978–79), Shaler Arthur U Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize Public Welfare Medal to HAROLD T.