Institute for Advanced Study
Independent research centre where Einstein, Gödel, and von Neumann worked
A separate institution from the university, the Institute for Advanced Study sits on its own wooded campus a mile south of Princeton centre. The Fuld Hall lawn and the surrounding woods are open to the public during daylight hours, and the Institute Woods behind the campus is a fine 600-acre nature preserve laced with footpaths.
The buildings themselves are mostly closed to non-scholars but the setting — long views across meadows toward the battlefield, the rumour of half-finished blackboards inside — has a quiet, slightly bookish atmosphere that the rest of Princeton lacks. Free to walk; bring sensible shoes.
things to do
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history
A story
The Institute was founded in 1930 with the explicit, slightly utopian aim of giving great minds total freedom to think. Its early permanent faculty included Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Hermann Weyl — at one stage, the IAS payroll contained a meaningful fraction of the world's most influential theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Some of the foundational work on the architecture of modern computers (von Neumann's report on the EDVAC, the IAS machine, the stored-program design) was done in these offices. Einstein walked the woods behind the Institute almost every afternoon for the last twenty years of his life.