Letter 2010 Summer

8/6/2019 Letter 2010 Summer

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BY ANNA MARIE SMITH

In my discipline, political theory, we love a good story.We tell each other stories about the lives and times ofgreat thinkers, such as Plato, Jefferson, or Gandhi. Weenter into the fictitious worlds like the state of nature inHobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Like unruly bit players onthe cast of a low-budget science-fiction film, we wanderaround the authors otherworldly sets, poking and prod-ding at their fantastic creations. We take their concep-tual vehicles out for snappy test drives, we throw fancywrenches into their scripts by conducting unauthorizedimprovisations, and we try out alternative endings.

We hope that our storytelling will have, in the end,some practical application. When it seems that we arelosing credibility with our audience, we usually try tobolster our claims about the practical relevance of ourwork by spinning another yarn or two.

Sometimes, however, we storytelling philosophersare invited to work with hands-on practitioners. Theseare the folks who perform the magic that really matters.

They are actually trying to work out concrete soto the problems related to our key conceptsaideas such as justice, equality, or democracthe ground, with real live people, ticking clockthat bind, and ever-shrinking budgets.

In the past year, I participated in the Dewey Son education in the School of Social Science. Acentury ago, John Dewey wrote landmark workamong other things, made the case that publiction can play a crucial role in producing individuare well prepared to make thoughtful and knowable contributions to society, not only as wage-taxpayers, and the heads of families, but as citwell. Conceived by Danielle Allen, UPS FounProfessor at the Institute, and Professor Rob RStanford University, the Dewey Seminar was dto foster research on the complex relationships beducation, schools, and the state.

The Dewey Seminar resembled a three-ring itual production. In one ring, we had a group of Min the School of Social Science: a collection of p

IASThe Institute LetterInstitute for Advanced Study Summer 2

The Fundamental LemmaFrom Minor Irritant to Central Problem

The fundamental lemma has beendescribed as a gross understate-ment.1 The curious thing is that it iscalled a lemma [a subsidiary proposi-tion to be proved on the way to

demonstrating a principal proposi-tion]. It is a theorem, says AndrewWiles, a Visitor in the School ofMathematics and an Institute Trustee.At first, it was thought to be a minorirritant, but it subsequently becameclear that it was not a lemma butrather a central problem in the field.

Robert Langlands, Professor Emeri-tus in the School of Mathematics, first

introduced the fundamental lemma in 1979 in a lecture, Les dbuts dune formule destraces stable, at the cole Normale Suprieure de Jeunes Filles and published in Pub-lications Mathmatiques de lUniversit Paris VII.2 The goal of the lecture was the stabi-lization of the Selberg trace formula, but it also introduced the fundamental lemma, atechnical device that links automorphic representations of different groups and thenotion of closely related transfer factors that could transport automorphic forms. Thisled to the creation of a field of study that Diana Shelstad, a former Member in theSchool of Mathematics and Langlandss student, eventually called endoscopy.

In the theory of endoscopy, the Selberg trace formula (introduced by the late AtleSelberg, Professor in the School of Mathematics) is used to distinguish the internal

Measuring the Cosmos, Mapping thGalaxy, Finding Planets

BY DAVID H. WEINBERG

W

hy is the expansion of the uni-verse speeding up, instead of

being slowed by the gravitationalattraction of galaxies and dark mat-ter? What is the history of the MilkyWay galaxy and of the chemicalelements in its stars? Why are theplanetary systems discovered aroundother stars so different from our ownsolar system? These questions are thethemesof SDSS-III, a six-year programof four giant astronomical surveys,and the focal point of my research atthe Institute during the last year.

In fact, the Sloan Digital SkySurvey (SDSS) has been a runningtheme through all four of my stays atthe Institute, which now span nearlytwo decades. As a long-term postdoctoral Member in the early 1990s, I jothe effort to design the survey strategy and software system for the SDSS, a that was then still in the early stages of fundraising, collaboration buildinhardware development. When I returned as a sabbatical visitor in 200102

Reflections on the Dewey Seminar Experience

Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 www.ia

Anna Marie Smith, Rosanna and Charles Jaffin Founders CircleMember in the School of Social Science, during a meeting of theDewey Seminar, where discussions might center on approachesto science education, barriers to graduation at community col-leges, or the level of control given to local school boards

Member Bao Chu Ngs proof of the fundamentallemma was confirmed last fall.

Member David H. Weinberg, Project ScienSloan Digital Sky Survey-III, gave a seminarputational cosmology and galaxy formation in

(Continued on page 4) (Continued on

(Continued on

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DIDIER FASSIN, James D. Wolfensohn Professor inthe School of Social Science, has edited Contem- porary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military andHumanitarian Interventions (Zone Books, 2010), withMariella Pandolfi, Professor at the University of Mon-treal. In the book, anthropologists, legal scholars, andpolitical scientists examine the historical antecedentsthat have made military and humanitarian interven-tions possible today. They also address the practicalprocess of intervention in global situations on fivecontinents, and investigate the ethical and political

consequences of generalizations of states of emer-gency. Fassin contributed a chapter titled Heart ofHumaneness: The Moral Economy of HumanitarianIntervention.

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HELMUT HOFER, Professor in the School of Math-ematics, has been elected to the German Academyof Sciences Leopoldina.

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ERIC S. MASKIN, Albert O. Hirschman Professorin the School of Social Science, has been awardedthe Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Artsand Sciences of Harvard University, and he gave the ZviGriliches Memorial Lectures at the New EconomicSchool in Moscow. Maskin and PIERRE DELIGNE,Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, wereawarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the FreeUniversity of Brussels in May.

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THOMAS SPENCER, Professor in the School ofMathematics, is among the seventy-two new mem-bers elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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SCOTT TREMAINE, Richard Black Professor in theSchool of Natural Sciences, has been awarded anhonorary Doctor of Science degree from the Universityof Toronto.

EDWARD WITTEN, Charles Simonyi Professor inthe School of Natural Sciences, has been awardedthe Lorentz Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academyof Arts and Sciences for his pioneering contributions tothe mathematical description of fundamental forces andelementary particles, particularly within string theory.Witten has also been awarded the Isaac Newton Medalby the Institute of Physics for his profound contributionsthat have transformed areas of particle theory, quantumfield theory, and general relativity. Witten received theaward in London at a meeting of the Institute of Physics

at which he gave the Isaac Newton Lecture on StringTheory and the Universe.

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Harvard University Press has published new editionsofThe Histories by Polybius, volumes 1 and 2 (LoebClassical Library), translated by W. R. Paton and editedby CHRISTIAN HABICHT, Professor Emeritus in theSchool of Historical Studies, and F. W. Walbank. Theeditions include corrected Greek text, explanatorynotes, and a new introduction.

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MARTIN REES, a cosmologist, astrophysicist, andInstitute Trustee, has been awarded RockefellerUniversitys Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing aboutScience for 2009. The award recognizes Reess book JustSix Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe(Basic Books, 2000). Rees is Professor Emeritus of Cos-mology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity Collegeat the University of Cambridge.

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PAUL MORAVEC, former Institute Artist-in-Residence (200708) and Artistic Consultant(200809), was elected a Member of the AmericanPhilosophical Society. Moravec is University Professorat Adelphi University.

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GRAHAM FARMELO, a Directors Visitor (2010),has received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize forScience and Technology for The Strangest Man: TheHidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (BasicBooks, 2009), which he worked on during his time at

the Institute.q

TARIK OREGAN, a Directors Visitor (2010), willpremiere Latent Manifest, a piece commissioned bythe BBC and composed largely at the Institute, onAugust 14 at the Proms classical music festival at theRoyal Albert Hall in London.

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JEFFREY R. HENIG, Member (200910) in theSchool of Social Science, has receivedthe OutstandingBook Award from the American Educational ResearchAssociation for Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used inPolicy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools (Russell SageFoundation and the Century Foundation, 2008).

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WARWICK H. ANDERSON, former Member(200506) in the School of Social Science, hasbeen awarded the 2010 William H. Welch Medal ofthe American Association for the History of Medicinefor his book The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning KuruScientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2008). Anderson, who worked on the book duringhis time at the Institute, is a Professorial Research Fellowin the Department of History and the Centre for Val-ues, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the Universityof Sydney.

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DAVID W. ANTHONY, former Member (2006) inthe School of Historical Studies, has been awardedthe Society for American Archaeologys 2010 Scholarly

Book Award for The Horse, the Wheel, and LaHow Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppesthe Modern World (Princeton University Presswhich he finished during his stay at the InAnthony is a Professor of Anthropology at HCollege.

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JAMES BINNEY, former Member (198387, the School of Natural Sciences, has been athe Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics. Bi

Professor at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for ThePhysics of the University of Oxford.

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BENJAMIN CLAUDE BROWER, former M(200708) in the School of Social Scienbeen awarded the David H. Pinkney Prize by thety for French Historical Studies for the best 2009 for A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 18441902 (CUniversity Press, 2009). Brower is Professor of Hthe University of Texas at Austin.

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FERGUS MILLAR, former Member (1968, 1in the School of Historical Studies, was knigservices to scholarship in the Queens Birthday in June. Millar is Emeritus Camden Professor of A

History at the University of Oxford.q

INEKE SLUITER, former Member (199697School of Historical Studies, is one of fourresearchers to be awarded the 2010 Spinoza Prizecarries an award of 2.5 million euros to fund rSluiter is currently Professor of Greek LanguLiterature at Leiden University.

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The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letawarded the 2010 Abel Prize to JOHNRENCE TATE, former Member (1959) in the SMathematics, for his lasting impact on numberTate is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at thversity of Texas at Austin.

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News of the Institute Community

Conten t s

2 News of the Institute Community

A Community of Scholars

3 Two New Trustees Appointed to Institute Board

Institute Marks Its Eightieth Year with Fall Celebrations

Jean Bourgain Wins 2010 Shaw Prize in Mathematics

5 Modern Mathematics and the Langlands Program

7 Asteroids as the Next Stepping Stones

8 Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy

10 A Distorted View of History Led America Astray

11 Why Jihad Went Global

12 Freeman Dyson: Reflections on a Friendship withCarl Kaysen

Einstein Legacy Society: Asset Allocation Strategiesfor the New Decade

13 John Rassweiler, Leading the Friends by Example

Verellen Charitable Gift Supports IAS

Charles Simonyis Return to Space

Questions and comments regardingthe Institute Letter should be directed to

Kelly Devine Thomas, Senior Publications Officer,via email at [email protected]

or by telephone at (609) 734-8091.

Issues of the Institute Letter and other Institute publicationsare available online at www.ias.edu/about/publications.

In its eightieth year, the Institute for AdvaStudy is endeavoring to create an online ence for its community of scholars, more thathousand historians, mathematicians, scienand social scientists around the world who benefited from membership.

A list of scholars formally affiliated withInstitute from its founding in 1930 up to thesent day has been published on the Institwebsite at www.ias.edu/people/cos. Earlieryear, letters from the Director, Peter Godwere sent to Institute scholars describingonline project and providing instructionsubmitting biographical and bibliograpinformation via an online form. Scholarencouraged to continue to update their infotion now and into the future, as the project ongoing effort to record the scope and depthe Institute community and its history. Subted information will be published online innear future; notifications will be sent onceavailable. Should you have questions regarA Community of Scholars, please [email protected]

A Community ofScholars


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Jean Bourgain, Professor in the School of Mathematics, hasbeen awarded the 2010 Shaw Prize in Mathematics for hisinfluential work in mathematical analysis and its applicationto partial differential equations, mathematical physics, combi-natorics, number theory, ergodic theory, and theoretical com-puter science.

The Shaw Prize, which consists of three annual awards of$1 million each in Astronomy, Life Science and Medicine, andMathematical Sciences, was established in 2002 by Sir RunRun Shaw, a Hong Kong film and television producer. Theinternational award, administered through the Shaw Founda-tion, was created to honor individuals who have achieved sig-nificant breakthroughs in scientific research and whose workhas resulted in a positive impact on mankind. The prizes willbe presented at ceremonies in Hong Kong on September 28.

Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, commented, Weare delighted that Bourgains remarkable contributions across awide area of mathematical analysis have been recognized bythe Shaw Prize. His achievements in solving many important, difficult, and long-standingproblems by introducing new mathematical techniques are unequalled today.

Bourgains work touches on many central topics of mathematical analysis: the geom-etry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, spectral problems, and non-linear partial differential equations from mathematical physics and combinatorialnumber theory. His work solved longstanding problems in convexity theory and har-monic analysis, such as Mahlers conjecture and the lambda-p set problem. It also hashad important consequences in theoretical computer science and on exponential sumsin analytic number theory. In Hamiltonian dynamics, he developed the theory of invari-ant Gibbs measures and quasi-periodicity for the Schrdinger equation.

The recipient of the Fields Medal in 1994, Bourgain has received many other honors,including the Empain Prize (1983), the A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart Prize (1985), the

Langevin Prize (1985), the Elie Cartan Prize (19Ostrowski Prize (1991), and the Vernadsky Gol(2010). Bourgain is a Foreign Member of the Frencemy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, tSwedish Academyof Sciences, and theAcademia E

Bourgain received his Ph.D. in 1977 and his Htion in 1979, both from the Free University of BHe was a Research Fellow at the National Fundentific Research in Belgium before beginning his tcareer at the Free University of Brussels. He heldsorships at the University of Illinois and IHS (des Hautes tudes Scientifiques) before joining ulty of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1994

David Spergel, who shares this years Shaw Astronomy, is a former Member (198588) in thtutes School of Natural Sciences. Spergel is cProfessor and Chair of the Department of AstroSciences at Princeton University.

Since the inauguration of the Shaw Prize in 2004, one or more of the recipienyear have been affiliated with the Institute. Faculty members who have receprize include Peter Goldreich, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Swho was awarded the prize in Astronomy in 2007, and Robert Langlands, PEmeritus in the School of Mathematics, who shared the Mathematics priRichard Taylor in 2007 (see articles, pages 1 and 5). In 2004, the late geometer Shen Chern, former Member (194346, 195455, 196465) in the School ofmatics, was recognized for his lifetime of achievement. Other former Membhave received the prize include: P. James Peebles (Astronomy, 2004); Andrew who is also an Institute Trustee (Mathematics, 2005); David Mumford (Math2006); Ludwig Faddeev (Mathematics, 2008); Frank Shu (Astronomy, 200Simon Donaldson (Mathematics, 2009). I

Two New Trustees Appointedto Institute Board

E.Robert Fernholz, Founder and Chief Investment Officerof INTECH, and John S. Hendricks, Founder andChairman of Discovery Communications, have been electedto the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Fernholz began his career as a mathematician at theUniversity of Washington, and later held Professorships atCity University of New York, Universidad Nacional deBuenos Aires, and Princeton University. Fernholz becameResearch Director at Arbitrage Management Company in

1980, and in 1987 he founded INTECH, an institutionalequity management firm. The INTECH portfolio process isbased on mathematical methods introduced by Fernholz inthe 1980s and later elaborated in his monograph Stochastic

Portfolio Theory (Springer 2002). Fernholz and his wife, Luisa, founded the MinervaResearch Foundation in 1993 to promote research in mathematical and statisticalsciences and to encourage the participation of women in these disciplines. LuisaFernholz directs the foundation, which has given support to the Institutes School ofMathematics since 2007.

Hendricks established the Cable Education Network,Inc., the predecessor of Discovery Communications, Inc.,in 1982, and he launched the Discovery Channel in 1985.Under Hendrickss leadership, the company has grown intoa global enterprise, with operations in more than 180 coun-tries and territories and more than 1.5 billion subscribers.The companys twenty-eight network entertainment brandsinclude TLC, Animal Planet, and Science Channel.

Hendricks was recognized by the National Education Asso-ciation for greatly expanding educational opportunityfor Americas schoolchildren. Hendricks and his wife,Maureen, provide grant support for science research andhigher education through the John and Maureen Hendricks

Charitable Foundation. Hendricks recently established the Experius Academy to sup-port adult lifelong learning through online courses and retreats.

Three members of the Board have been named Trustees Emeriti. Richard B. Black,President and Chief Executive Officer of ECRM Incorporated, is the outgoing ViceChairman of the Board and served as a Trustee since 1990. Martin A. Chooljian, Pres-ident of CH Capital Investments, served as a Trustee since 1997. James D. Wolfensohn,Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Wolfensohn & Company, served as a Trusteesince 1979 and was Chairman of the Board from 1986 to 2007. I

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Professor Jean Bourgain with Russell Impagliazzo, Visiting

Professor in the School of Mathematics, at a workshop on pseudorandomness, one of the many areas of mathematicsinfluenced by Bourgains work

Jean Bourgain Wins 2010 Shaw Prize in Mathematics

E. Robert Fernholz

John S. Hendricks

ANDREAKANE

ROBERTSEVERI

Institute Marks Its Eightieth Yearwith Fall Celebrations

To celebrate its eightanniversary, the InstituteAdvanced Study has plantwo weekends, each of which illustrate the work of two oSchools and present opportuties for former Members

others to return and meet curMembers and Faculty.

When it was established1930, the Institute aimed to vide, in the words of its foundDirector Abraham Flexnerhaven where scholars and sctists could regard the world

its phenomena as their laboratory without being carried off into the maelstof the immediate. Over the past eight decades, the Institute has held remaably true to that vision, offering an environment where leading researchfrom around the world can explore fundamental questions driven purelytheir curiosity and imagination. The Members and former Members of Institute form an increasingly interconnected and extended communitscholars that now numbers more than six thousand.

The program featuring the Schools of Mathematics and Natural Scienwill occur on Friday and Saturday, September 24 and 25, and will include s

inars and lectures by current members of the Faculty, as well as by former Fulty John Milnor and Frank Wilczek. The Schools of Historical Studies Social Science will hold their program on Friday and Saturday, Novemberand 13, and will present seminars and a lecture featuring current Facultywell as a panel discussion moderated by Institute Trustee Harold Shapiro.

All current and former Faculty and Members are welcome to attend bothebrations. It is hoped that many will return to join in these events and remain engaged in the work of the Institute. To register and to view full proginformation, please visit www.ias.edu/news/80th. Questions may be [email protected] or Linda Geraci, AMIAS Liaison, at (609) 734-8259. I


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structure of automorphic representations of differentgroups. The fundamental lemma, which has beendescribed as a matching conjecture,3 is a very preciseconjecture used in the Selberg trace formula to provesome cases of the principle of functoriality. The princi-ple of functoriality is a core conjecture of the Langlandsprogram that seeks to establish symmetry between wholenumbers and links automorphic representations of dif-ferent groups through their L-groups. Using laymansterms, Peter Sarnak, Professor in the School of Mathe-matics, compares the fundamental lemma to a screw-driver, functoriality to opening a screw, and theLanglands program to the big machine working to revealthe underlying structure of automorphic forms.

Over the years, the fundamental lemma turned outto be incredibly difficult to prove in the general case,although progress was made in specific cases, throughwork done by Langlands, his students, and others at theInstitute and elsewhere. For more than two decades,Langlands gave up on resolving the fundamental lemmaand spent his time studying fields unrelated to the Lang-lands program, most recently lattice models of statisticalphysics and the attendant conformal invariance. Thefundamental lemma was a problem that I thought waseasy and it turned out to be hard, says Langlands. Theimpulse is to concentrate on the problem, and so youconcentrate on it for years. You dont, for obvious rea-

sons, have the confidence to thinkbeyond it. You can say, Well, Illjust assume it and think beyond it.But then every person you meet willsay, But what if it isnt true?

Still, the resolution of the funda-mental lemma was presumed inmajor works, such as the stabilizationof the Arthur-Selberg trace formula.(The Arthur-Selberg trace formulaitself was developed by James Arthur,

a former Member and Trustee.) Lastfall, thirty years after Langlands firstintroduced it, a proof of the funda-mental lemma by Bao Chu Ng, aMember in the School of Mathemat-ics from 200610, was confirmed.(Financial support for Ngs Member-ship in 200910 was provided by theCharles Simonyi Endowment andthe Ambrose Monell Foundation.)

Ngs proof, based on a geometricinterpretation of endoscopy theory,follows the work of many othermathematicians, including MarkGoresky, Thomas Hales, HervMichel Jacquet, Robert Kottwitz,

Jean-Pierre Labesse, Grard Laumon, Robert MacPher-

son, Jonathan Rogawski, Shelstad, Rainer Weissauer,and Jean-Loup Waldspurger. It is very rare that you cantake a proof in the geometric setting and convert it to thegenuine number theoretic setting. That is what has tran-spired through Ngs achievement, says Sarnak. Nghas provided a bridge, and now everybody is using thisbridge. What he has done is deep. It is below the surfaceand it is understandingsomethingtruly fundamental. Thereare a number of theorems that, in the past, would haveincluded the statement, Assume the fundamental lemma,then the following remarkable thing is true. A number oftheoriesstatements that were of great interest butwerent known to be trueare now known to be true.

In 1967, Langlands wrote a seventeen-page hand-written letter to Andr Weil, a Professor at the Instituteat the time, in which he proposed a grand unifying the-ory that relates seemingly unrelated concepts in numbertheory, algebraic geometry, and the theory of automor-phic forms. A typed copy of the letter,4 made at Weilsrequest for easier reading, circulated widely amongmathematicians in the late 1960s and 1970s, and formore than three decades, mathematicians have beenworking on its conjectures, known collectively as theLanglands program.

The Langlands program, of which endoscopy theoryis a part, is incredibly vast and far-reaching and hasmany different manifestations. It is one of the greatinsights into twentieth-century mathematics. It is abeautiful synthesis of the theory of numbers and symme-trythe theory of groupsspecifically Lie groups, saysSarnak. It gives a vision of what you can do with a the-ory of groups in connection with number theory. It givesthe boundaries of what you can hope to do, but it alsoshows what you cant do. This insight has created fruitsin every direction, meaning people who work on somelittle aspect of it are forced to understand what theyredoing better in order that other people can use it.

In addition to changing the field of automorphicforms drastically, making the infinite-dimensional repre-sentation theory of reductive groups into a major field ofmathematical activity, and introducing a general class ofL-functions that have had major consequences for alge-braic number theory, Langlandss conjectures have had asignificant influence on other fields, such as physics. Inthe geometric Langlands program, created by formerMember Vladimir Drinfeld and collaborators, some ofthe ideas are converted from number theory into state-ments in geometry. The geometric form is particularlyrich for implications in theoretical physics, especially

string theory. In 2006, Edward Witten, Charles S

Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, co225-page paper on the relation of part of the geLanglands program to ideas of the duality betwetricity and magnetism.5 During his time at the I

Ng has been working on a program to brArthur-Selberg trace formula into the frameworgeometric Langlands program.

The use of the trace formula to prove cfunctoriality requires combinatorial identitiesdamental lemmabetween orbital integrals. integrals and weighted orbital integrals are thethe local harmonic analysis and invariant hanalysis theories developed by the late Harish-CProfessor in the School of Mathematics. In crudone side of the trace formula contains termsto the characters of automorphic representobserves Hales.6 The other side contains termsorbital integrals. Thanks to the trace formula, idbetween orbital integrals on different groups imptities between the representations of the two gro

From early on, attempts to prove the fundalemma have involved geometric interpretationidentities of orbital integralsinterpretations thbecome increasingly sophisticated through the

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FUNDAMENTAL LEMMA (Continued from page 1)

The Unity of Mathematics

Mathematics is part of the general scientific culture.We are contributing to a whole, organic collection ofideas, even if the part of mathematics which Im doing nowis not of direct relevance and usefulness to other people.If mathematics is an integrated body of thought, and every

part is potentially useful to every other part, then we areall contributing to a common objective. If mathematics isto be thought of as fragmented specializations, all goingoff independently and justifying themselves, then it is veryhard to argue why people should be paid to do this. Weare not entertainers, like tennis players. The only justifi-cation is that it is a real contribution to human thought.Even if Im not directly working in applied mathematics,I feel that Im contributing to the sort of mathematics thatcan and will be useful for people who are interested inapplying mathematics to other things.

Michael Atiyah

Modern mathematics has become so extensive and socomplex that it is essential, if mathematics is to stay as awhole and not become a pile of little bits of research, to

provide a unification, which absorbs in some simple andgeneral theories all the common substrata of the diversebranches of the science, suppressing what is not so useful

and necessary, and leaving intact what is truly the specif-ic detail of each big problem. . . . Very few persons arecapable of grasping the entire forefront of science, of seiz-ing not only the weak points of resistance, but also the

part that is most important to take on, the art of massingthe troops, of making each sector work toward the successof the others, etc.

Andr Weil

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept amathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of

formal conclusions and computations, which we traverseblindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want

first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want tounderstand the idea of the proof, the deeper context. . . .

A modern mathematical proof is not very different from amodern machine, or a modern test setup: the simple fun-

damental principles are hidden and almost invisible undera mass of technical details.

Hermann Weyl

In his conjectures, now collectively known as the Langlands program, Robert Ladrew on the work of Hermann Weyl (left), Andr Weil (top, right), and Harish-C(bottom, right), among others with extensive ties to the Institute.

LOTTEMEITNER-GRAF,

LONDON

The following mathematicians and physicists, menin the accompanying articles about the fundamlemma, are or have been affiliated with the Institu

Advanced Study as a Professor and/or Member.information about their affiliations and dates of assocmay be found at www.ias.edu/people/cos.

James ArthurMichael AtiyahBill CasselmanPierre DelignePaul DiracVladimir DrinfeldEdward FrenkelMark GoreskyThomas HalesHarish-ChandraHerv Michel JacquetRobert Kottwitz

Jean-Pierre LabesseRobert Langlands

Grard LaumonRobert MacPhersBao Chu Ng

Jonathan RogawsPeter SarnakAtle SelbergDiana ShelstadGoro ShimuraAndr WeilRainer WeissauerHermann WeylAndrew WilesEdward Witten


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It has been said that the goals ofmodern mathematics are recon-

struction and development.1 Theunifying conjectures betweennumber theory and representationtheory that Robert Langlands,Professor Emeritus in the Schoolof Mathematics, articulated in aletter to Andr Weil in 1967, con-tinue a tradition at the Institute ofadvancing mathematical knowl-edge through the identification ofproblems central to the under-standing of active areas or likelyto become central in the future.

Two striking qualities ofmathematical concepts regardedas central are that they are simul-taneously pregnant with possibilities for their own development and, so far as we canjudge from a history of two and a half millennia, of permanent validity, says Lang-lands. In comparison with biology, above all with the theory of evolution, a fusionof biology and history, or with physics and its two enigmas, quantum theory and rel-ativity theory, mathematics contributes only modestly to the intellectual architec-

ture of mankind, but its cecontributions have been lasone does not supersede anothenlarges it.2

In his conjectures, now cotivelyknownas theLanglandgram, Langlands drew on the of Harish-Chandra, Atle SelGoro Shimura, Andr WeilHermann Weyl, among owith extensive ties to the Inst

Weyl, whose appointmethe Institutes Faculty in followed those of Albert Einand Oswald Veblen, was a stbeliever in the overall unimathematics, across discipand generations. Weyl h

major impact on the progress of the entire field of mathematics, as well as phwhere he was equally comfortable. His work spanned topology, differential geomLie groups, representation theory, harmonic analysis, and analytic number thand extended into physics, including relativity, electromagnetism, and qua

Modern Mathematics and the Langlands Program

Goresky, Kottwitz, Laumon, MacPherson, and Ng.Ngs interest in the fundamental lemma7 came in the

late 1990s when he was writing his Ph.D. dissertation ona conjecture related to the fundamental lemma by Jacquet(who, with Langlands, proved the Jacquet-Langlandscorrespondence in 1970, providing one of the first exam-ples of functoriality8). Through my work on Jacquetsconjectures, I found a completely new method to tacklethese kinds of problems to prove equalities, says Ng. Iwas quite tempted by Langlandss fundamental lemmabut I was ill equipped. I needed to learn more of the

mathematics and understand what it was about. I did notwork on the lemma for maybe five or six years until I feltready. In the meantime, other people were working on it.My own ideas were certainly not enough.

By 2004, Ng was deeply invested in trying to solvethe fundamental lemma. But he ran into a roadblockwhile trying to use the equivariant cohomologyapproach, which provides essential insight into thetopological nature of the lemma, introduced by Goresky,Kottwitz, and MacPherson, Hermann Weyl Professor inthe School of Mathematics. I went into quite a despair.I had spent three years working on every possible angle,says Ng. I still believed the problem I set for myselfwas a good one. But I was missing one step. In 2006,

during a three-month visit to the Institute, where heconducted a seminar on the fundamental lemma, Ngasked Goresky about a statement concerning perversesheaves, which is unrelated to the fundamental lemmabut provided insight for Ng. He explained to me oneexample that he and MacPherson knew where it couldbe proved, says Ng. It was the missing piece of mypuzzle. Everything fit together. Still, it was not an easyprocess. There were a lot of details that had to be workedout very carefully. By spring 2007, Ng was convincedthat his proof worked. He returned to the Institute in fall

2007 and ran another seminar about the fundamentallemma, during which his proof was scrutinized by PierreDeligne, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathemat-ics, and others. His paper went through six different ver-sions before it was made available online in 2008, andrecently published.9

It was Waldspurgers work that suggested that theproof of the fundamental lemma could be arrived at inthe geometric setting, which allows deformations, incontrast to number theory, which does not. Transfer fac-tors, wherein orbital integrals on one group are multi-

plied in order to be orbital integrals on the other, arenecessary to transport automorphic forms. A transferconjecture was formulated initially by Langlands andShelstad, then later by Kottwitz and Shelstad in a moreflexible and twisted form. In the mid 1990s, Waldspurgerproved that the transfer conjecture would follow fromthe corresponding fundamental lemma.

This was quite a surprise, notes Arthur.10 For thefundamental lemma pertains to very special functions atcertain p-adic places, while the transfer conjecture appliesto general functions at all p-adic places. Waldspurger usedglobal methods, specifically a simple version of the traceformula, to solve what was a local problem. Shelstad hadalready solved the transfer problem for archimedianplaces, using Harish-Chandras work, which served as aguide for the construction of general transfer factors. Inthe past few years, Waldspurger also completed a far-

reaching study in harmonic analysis, which among otherthings reduces the transfer conjecture of Kottwitz andShelstad to a form of the fundamental lemma.

In his proof of the fundamental lemma, Ng exploit-ed the interplay of local and global methods in inge-nious ways, according to Arthur, and observed that theentire geometric side could be expressed as a sum overthe rational points of an arithmetic Hitchin fibration,the arithmetic analogue of a variety familiar from thetheory ofG-bundles on a Riemann surface.

Important arithmetic applications follow fromendoscopy theory, including the transfer of automorphicrepresentations from classical groups to linear groupsand the construction of Galois representations attachedto automorphic forms via Shimura varieties (developedby Goro Shimura, a frequent Member at the Institute).Shimura varieties are a central part of Langlandssprogram, both as a source of representations of Galoisgroups and as tests for the conjecture that all motivicL-functions are automorphic.11 In addition to being crit-

ical to the comparison of trace formulas that isthe theory of endoscopy, the fundamental lemma

tial in the comparison of the automorphic Arthurtrace formula and the geometric Grothendieck-Ltrace formula needed to establish reciprocity Shimura varieties.

With the proof of the fundamental lemma, Lais thinking again about how the stabilized trace might be used to establish the basic conjectureslined in 1967. Until recently, I didnt have ahow one could attack these basic conjectures inuinely promising fashion, says Langlands. But tabout the proof of the fundamental lemma and thniques it provides, I shouldnt say Im optimistreally think there is something there on which get a handle.

About six years ago, when he heard of the pbeing made with the fundamental lemma, Labegan working in an area he calls beyond endoPrimary among Langlandss interests is usArthur-Selberg trace formula to resolve the prin

55

(Continued on p

(Continued on

Robert Langlandss papers and some of his correspondence and lectures are available at http://publications.ias.edu/rpl.

S P E C I A L P R O G R A M 2 0 1 0 1

Galois Representationsand Automorphic Forms

During the 201011 academic year, RiTaylor of Harvard University will b

Distinguished Visiting Professor in the SchMathematics. He will lead a program on Grepresentations and automorphic forms.

The program will embrace all aspects oconjectural relationship between automoforms and Galois representations: functorialitLanglandss conjectures, analytic approacheparticular the trace formula), algebraic appro(those growing out of Wiless work on FermatTheorem), p-adic Hodge theory (the so caladic Langlands program) and applications toproblems in number theory.

There will be a weekly seminar and a weekworkshop during the week of March 21, highlighting recent developments connectedthe program.

An often successful strategy, even

though slow and usually inglorious, forbreaching an otherwise unassailablemathematical problem is to reduce some

aspect of it to a concrete, accessible formon which at least small inroads can bemade and some experience acquired.

Robert Langlands


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6

observations werefinallywell underway.My concentration during that year was devel-oping theoretical modeling and statisticalanalysis techniques, which we later applied toSDSS maps of cosmic structure to infer theclustering of invisible dark matter from theobservable clustering of galaxies. By the timeI returned for a one-term visit in 2006, theproject had entered a new phase known asSDSS-II, and I had become the spokespersonof a collaboration that encompassed more

than three hundred scientists at twenty-fiveinstitutions around the globe. With SDSS-IIscheduled to complete its observations inmid-2008, I joined a seven-person committeethat spent countless hours on the telephonethat fall, sorting through many ideas suggest-ed by the collaboration and putting togetherthe program that became SDSS-III.

The SDSS uses a dedicated telescope(located in New Mexico) with a 2.5-meter-diameter mirror, similar in size to the HubbleSpace Telescopes, but much smaller thanthose of the largest ground-based telescopes(whose mirrors are eight to ten meters across).What makes the SDSS special are the excep-tionally powerful instruments on the back ofthe telescope. The first is a giant digital cam-

erathe largest in the world at the time it wasbuiltwhich has taken deep, multicolorimages that cover more than half the north-ern-hemisphere sky, detecting over 100 milliongalaxies and 200 million stars. But to measurethe distance to a galaxy or the velocity andchemical composition of a star, one has to dis-perse its light through a prism and identify thefine features etched on its spectrum by individ-ual species of atoms, a kind of observationthat astronomers have traditionally done oneobject at a time. The SDSS took this three-dimensional mapping into mass production byfeeding its spectrographs with 640 opticalfibers, plugged into 640 precision-drilled holeson a thirty-inch aluminum plate, each holeadmitting the light from a single preselectedgalaxy, star, or quasar. After eight years of oper-ations and more than 2,600 plates, SDSS I andII had measured spectra of nearly one milliongalaxies, more than one hundred thousandquasars, and half a million stars.

The largest of the SDSS-III surveys (known as BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spec-troscopic Survey) is aimed at the biggest mystery of contemporary cosmology: the accel-erating expansion of the universe. While cosmic expansion was discovered eighty yearsago by Edwin Hubble, it had generally been assumed that the expansion would slowdown over time because of the gravitational attraction of matter in the universe. In thelate 1990s, however, astronomers studying distant supernova explosions found that theexpansion of the universe has been speeding up for the last five billion years. Either theuniverse is pervaded by an exotic form of energy that exerts repulsive gravityperhapsthe vacuum energy produced by quantum mechanical fluctuations in otherwise emptyspaceor else our prevailing theory of gravity itself breaks down on cosmological scales,maybe because gravity leaks into extra spatial dimensions that are hidden from oureveryday experience.

BOSS will test the vacuum energy hypothesis with unprecedented precision,using a novel method that relies on a subtle feature in the clustering of galaxies andintergalactic matter. This feature, the imprint of baryon acoustic oscillations in theearly universe, has a known physical scale, and after measuring its apparent size (e.g.,as an angle on the sky) one can use simple trigonometry to infer the distances toobjects that are billions of light years away. Precise determinationsaccurate to 1percent or betterrequire measuring cosmic structure over enormous volumes, whichBOSS will do by mapping the spatial distribution of 1.5 million luminous galaxies andof absorbing gas along the lines of sight to 150,000 distant quasars. BOSS observesfainter objects than the original SDSS, so it required major upgrades to the spectro-graphsmore sensitive detectors, more efficient optical elements, 1,000 fibers insteadof 640which were installed and commissioned in fall 2009. The survey is now run-ning full tilt and producing its first scientific results. However, the system is very com-plex, so a typical week still brings a software glitch or hardware problem thatgenerates a cascade of email traffic and telecon discussion, and in rare cases an emer-

gency trip to New Mexico by oneinstrument experts.

Closer to home, two SDSS-III survmap the structure and formation hiour own galaxy, the Milky Way. SE(whose acronymic history is too comto recount here) focuses on the outerwhich observations and theory suggbuilt largely via acts of galactic cannwith the gravity of the Milky Way strand eventually destroying infalling s

galaxies. The SEGUE maps (from Sand SDSS-III combined) contain350,000 stars, revealing partly dstrands of these galactic progenitors. Tlar motions measured by SEGUE alsthe mass and shape of the dark mattewhose gravity holds the Milky Way to

The inner galaxy is hidden from oby interstellar dust, tiny smokelike pthat float between the stars and blocklight. APOGEE (the Apache Point Otory Galactic Evolution Experiment) wthe inner galaxy using an innovative graph that measures infrared lightpasses through interstellar dust neascathed. With the exception of hyhelium, and lithium, all atoms in the u

were forged in stars, then dispersed torounding gas when the stars died. Aspectra will allow separate measuremedozen chemical elementscarbon, silicon, sulfur, iron, titanium, etc.fof the 100,000 stars that it observes. different elements form via different pathways in different kinds of stars, APOGEEs chemical fingerprintswilinformation not just about the star beisured but about all of the preceding stcontributed to its composition.

One of the biggest developments inomy over the last fifteen years has bdiscovery of planets outside the solarmost of them found via the slight they induce as they orbit their parenMany of the planetary systems discovdate are very different from our owmassive, Jupiter-like planets that looptheir parent stars in months or eve

often following elongated elliptical paths rather than the nearly circular orbprevail in the solar system. These oddities suggest that many planets migratbirth or undergo chaotic gravitational battles with their siblings. The Sloan survin characteristic fashion, attack this problem with large numbers, monitoring a10,000 stars using a novel, fiber-fed instrument that can measure tiny motions (as a few meters per second) of sixty stars at a time. MARVELS (the Multi-objeRadial Velocity Large-area Survey) hopes to detect between one and two hJupiter-like planets in close orbits, allowing quantitative statistical tests of theplanet formation and discovering rare systems that may reveal crucial short-livees in planetary evolution.

The Institute for Advanced Study helped start the SDSS with a criticallfinancial contribution, but over the lifetime of the project its most important ctions have been human ones. Many Institute Members have done spectacularwith SDSS data over the years, and today four of the dozen scientists on the toSDSS-III management committee are former IAS postdocs. This is a remarkabtic for a small institution focused largely on theoretical research. It speaks to thinteraction between theorists and observers in contemporary astronomywitindividuals who straddle what was once a clear line of demarcationand equalsuccess of the Institute in inspiring its Members to pursue ambitious lines of rwhose payoff may lie many years in the future. I

MEASURING THE COSMOS (Continued from page 1)

David H. Weinberg is Professor of Astronomy and Distinguished Professor of Mmatical and Physical Sciences at Ohio State University. He was an AMIAS-suppMember in the School of Natural Sciences during the 200910 academic year anda Member in the School in 199294, 200102, and 2006. He is the Project Sciof SDSS-III.

An SDSS-III plugplate, which admits light from preselected galaxies, stars, and quasars,superposed on an SDSS sky image

Each dot on this slice through an SDSS map represents a galaxy, which is typically made upof about 100 billion stars. Blue dots mark younger and red dots mark older galaxies. The earthis located at the vertex of the slicethe most distant galaxies in this map are 2 billion light yearsaway from it.

D.

SCHLEGEL/SDSS-III

M.

BLANTON/SDSS


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mechanics. For [Weyl] the best of the past was not for-gotten, notes Michael Atiyah, a former Institute Pro-fessor and Member, but was subsumed and refined bythe mathematics of the present.3

Geometry and analysis were central to Weyls interests,and his inclination to organize and synthesize drew himto the theory of groups and their representations, alsoknown as symmetry. Weyl brought representation theoryinto quantum mechanics, leading the way for modernphysicists to think of unexpected regularities in terms ofunderlying symmetry groups.

With much help from Weyl, Liegroups andLie algebrasbecame central to mathematics and theoretical physics.Under the combined influences of relativity theory andquantum mechanics, the study of infinite-dimensionalrepresentations of Lie groups was transformed into amajor field in contemporary mathematics by Harish-Chandra. Harish-Chandra first came to the Institute in194748 as an assistant to the theoretical physicist PaulDirac, who wrote one of the first papers on infinitedimensional irreducible representations. Harish-Chandraultimately abandoned physics to study representationtheory and harmonic analysis of semisimple Lie groups.

Langlandss early work in representation theoryinvolved adapting the methods of Harish-Chandra to thetheory of automorphic forms. Endoscopy, which aims todistinguish the internal structure of automorphic repre-

sentations of different groups, arose from Langlandssstudy of the zeta functions of Shimura varieties developedby Goro Shimura and in the theory of the discrete series,a theory created by Harish-Chandra at the Institute inthe sixties. The modern theory of Shimura varieties, sonamed by Langlands in the 1970s, began with the devel-opment of the theory of abelian varieties with complexmultiplication by Shimura, Yutaka Taniyama, and Weilin the mid-1950s.

Langlandss principle of functoriality, which uses theSelberg trace formula and the fundamental lemma to linkautomorphic representations of different groups throughtheir L-groups, was informed by the theory of class fields,and the representation theory of semisimple Lie groups inthe form given to it by Harish-Chandra.

Much of the modern theory of automorphic forms isgoverned by two fundamental problems that are at theheart of the Langlands program: Langlandss principle offunctoriality and the general analogue of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture on modular elliptic curves. Thework of Andrew Wiles that led to a proof of Fermats LastTheorem suggests that the two problems, among the deep-est questions in mathematics, are inextricably linked.4

Weyl was the father of the theory of representations ofLie groups,and Harish-Chandra was oneof thegreat cham-pions of the subject before Langlands came along, saysPeter Sarnak, Professor in the School of Mathematics. The

theoryof representationscomes up in physics. It comalgebra. Langlandss insight was its role in number th

The breadth and scope of Langlandss mathevision, from the trace formula, functorialiendoscopy to representation theory and Shimueties, can be explored through his papers and somcorrespondence and lectures, which are pohttp://publications.ias.edu/rpl/. The materials prsense of the historical context, precedents, andrations that led to the recent proof of the fundalemma. They also articulate Langlandss view of thlems still in need of attention and suggest directunifying distant concepts and finding new connbetween apparently unrelated subjects. I

1 On A.Weil, by Yutaka Taniyama,Bulletin of the Americamatical Society 46, no. 4 (October 2009), 66768

2 Is There Beauty in Mathematical Theories? lecture dby Robert P. Langlands, University of Notre Dame, Jan2010, http://publications.ias.edu/rpl_works/L12/beauty/

3 Hermann Weyl, November 9, 1885December 9, 195Michael Atiyah, Biographical Memoirs 82, (National Aemies Press, 2003), www.nap.edu/readingroom.php?boomems&page=hweyl.html

4 Preface by James Arthur, David Ellwood, Robert KottwHarmonic Analysis, the Trace Formula, and Shimura VariClay Mathematics Proceedings 4 (2005), 26566,www.claymath.org/library/proceedings/cmip04.pdf

7

BY PIET HUT

In April, President Obama laid out an inter-esting new vision for human exploration ofthe solar system, more exciting that anythingthat has been proposed in the last forty years.A key component of his vision is the proposalto send humans to asteroids, first, well beforesending them to Mars, while skipping themoon as a destination.

During the first thirty years after the lastmoon landing, in 1972, human space flighthas been rather boring, frankly. The shuttlewas built mainly to reach the InternationalSpace Station, while that Space Station wasbuilt mainly to give the shuttle something tofly to. It all happened a few hundred milesabove the surface of Earth, in stark contrastwith the short era of only three years,196972, in which there were travelers whoreally left Earth to visit another body, themoon.

Whether it is worth the money and effort to explorethe solar system by sending humans out to places otherthan the near-Earth environment is a matter of debate.Scientifically, one can make a case for money being bet-ter spent through robotic on-site exploration and tele-

scopic remote observations. But human space flight isnot primarily about science. It is the direct extension ofmany centuries of exploration, and as such it seemsworth the effort. For one thing it is exciting in itself, andfor another, we wont know what its advantages will be,in the long run, unless we give it a try.

Back in 2003, President Bush finally presented a for-ward-looking vision for human space flight that wouldleave low Earth orbit. However, the main goal was areturn to the moon, mainly to redo what had been donealready decades earlier. What makes Obamas visionmuch more interesting is it requires a jump that is just alittle further than what is required to reach the moon,but far less of a jump than what is needed to reach Mars.Instead of reaching for one of the two closest planets toEarth, the idea is to visit one of the hundreds of thou-

sands of asteroids that come far closer to Earth thananother planet ever does.

In fact, some of the asteroids sometimes come veryclose to Earth, too close for comfort. The most dramaticdocumented historical impact was the one that tookplace sixty-five million years ago, creating a more than

one-hundred-mile-wide crater that is now buried deepunder the surface in the Yucatan Peninsula. It was thisimpact that caused the demise of the dinosaurs, as wellas a significant fraction of all species present on Earth atthat time. Clearly, it is in our interest to not go the wayof the dinosaurs ourselves, and to keep an eye out forfuture encounters of that kind.

The a priori chance for Earth to be hit by a ten-kilo-meter-diameter asteroid, like the one that hit Mexico atthe end of the Cretaceous period, at any given time israther small. And thanks to an intense observationalcampaign during the last few decades, we now know thatthe chance will be significantly smaller than statisticallyexpected, at least during the next few centuries. Thereason is that we have mapped most of the large aster-oids with orbits crossing the orbit of Earth, and the good

news is that none of those floating moare currently on a collision course whome planet.

However, the bad news is that thhundreds of thousands of smaller asteour vicinity, each more than one hmeters in diameter, and they can stienormous destruction on a local scaone of them to hit Earth. While most have not yet been discovered, an activvational program is being developed w

goal of charting them all, or at leastmajority of them. We dont know whprogram will teach us: whether all athat we find will miss us, or whether thbe one or more that are headed for uforeseeable future.

If and when observations show usmall asteroid is on its way to hit Eachallenge will be to try to deflect it breaches us. Rather than waiting for asteroid to be discovered, it would be f

prudent to be proactive, to explore asteroids detail, to characterize their nature and compositheir physical properties in general.

It will be so much more interesting to watcnauts hop around in the very low gravity of an aas a tiny world in itself, compared with going ba

again to the moon. And it will give us more infoabout the kind of impact danger that is permlurking out there for us, small but not negligibly

Asteroids as the Next Stepping Stones

Professor Piet Hut, who heads the Institutesgram in Interdisciplinary Studies, has been acti promoting the protection of Earth from asimpacts since he started the B612 Found(www.b612foundation.org) in 2002, togetheranother astrophysicist and two astronauts. Hlong advocated the idea of astronauts visitinasteroid, including in a 2003 piece that appeara publication to honor the astronauts who dithe crash of the Space Shuttle Columbiawww.edge.org/3rd_culture/columbia/columbia.html

Piet Hut (center), who heads the Institutes Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, has longadvocated the idea of astronauts visiting an asteroid and protecting Earth from asteroid impacts.

ANDREA

KANE

MODERN MATHEMATICS (Continued from page 5)


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8

BY SETH MOGLEN

Members of the Dewey Seminar in theSchool of Social Science are working ona range of issues, but all of our inquiries haveled back in one way or another to the problemof democracy and education. I am interestedspecifically in the question of what truly demo-cratic research universities might look like inthe twenty-first century. My own work in this

area is based on an experiment in universitycommunity collaboration that I codirect atLehigh University, a midsized private researchuniversity located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Bethlehem was founded in 1741 as a utopianreligious community by the Moravians, apietist, central European Protestant sect. TheMoravians created a communal economy, inwhich everyone worked for the communityand received on equal terms not only food,shelter, and clothing, but also access to freeeducation, childcare, healthcare, and care forthe elderly. There was an exceptional level ofgender symmetry and racial integration in MoravianBethlehem. Women had been freed from the burden ofprivatized childcare and domestic labor so that theycould assume spiritual and social leadership roles.

Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans speaking atleast sixteen languages lived, worked, worshipped, andlearned together. Everyone was taught to read. In con-trast to the usual story of failed utopias, the communitywas economically successful and technologicallyadvanced.

The egalitarianism of this community was, however,compromised in emblematically American ways fromthe outset. Most of the Africans, living in conditions ofmaterial equality with their European co-religionists,were also held as chattel by the church. The town wasbuilt on land that had been stolen from the native peo-ple, the Lenape, in an especially cynical manner. Anddespite its prosperity, the communal economy was dis-mantled after one generation by church leaders in Ger-many. The ensuing privatization of social and economiclife led swiftly to the collapse of both economic and gen-der equality.

A hundred years later, in the late nineteenth centu-ry, Bethlehem became one of the iconic steel towns ofindustrial America. It was home to Bethlehem Steel,one of the worlds largest steel companies and one of thewealthiest corporations in American history. BethlehemSteel played an important role in the development ofstructural steel, most famously the I-beam, which madepossible the skyscrapers, suspension bridges, and battle-ships of the twentieth century.

For a century, every aspect of life in the city revolvedaround the massive Bethlehem Steel plant. Virtuallyevery family in the city owed its livelihood, directly orindirectly, to the Steel. It created extraordinary wealthfor its owners and for its large managerial class: at mid-century, many of the wealthiest Americans were Bethle-hem Steel executivesand they built their mansions onthe north side of the city. The Steel also created liveli-hoods for thousands of working-class immigrants frommany nations, who poured into South Bethlehem towork in the plant. These immigrants built tight-knit,intergenerationally sustained ethnic neighborhoods.Some people today are still living in the houses theywere born in eighty or ninety years ago.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,there was intense economic exploitation in Bethlehem.Many steel workers were maimed or killed on the job,and they worked long hours for low wages. There was, inresponse, a long history of labor organizing at theSteeland of fierce anti-union violence. The Steel wasfinally unionized in 1941, on the eve of Americasentrance into World War II, in the wake of an especially

violent strike and the subsequent intervention of theRoosevelt administration. As a result of workers suc-cessful organization, there were, for fifty years, goodunion jobs at the Steel, which brought higher wages,

improved safety, paid vacations, good healthcare plans,and pensions. The union transformed Bethlehem into amodel of postwar working-class prosperity.

Starting in the late 1970s, the U.S. steel industryunderwent an intensifying crisis, as a result of risingcompetition from international steel producers andfrom non-union domestic mini-mills. This crisisresulted in the gradual scaling back and ultimate clo-sure of the steel plant in Bethlehem in 1995. In 2001,the Bethlehem Steel Corporation went bankrupt. It

pursued a bankruptcy strategy that has become thenorm for major American corporations: the companyslawyers persuaded the courts to allow them to sell offassets to other companies while shedding pensionand health plans for retirees. As a result, thousands offormer Bethlehem Steel employees lost the retirementand medical security for which they had given lifetimesof work.

Today, more than a quarter of South Side residentslive in poverty. South Bethlehem suffers from manyrelated social problems, including failing public schoolsand serious public health challenges. The former Beth-lehem Steel site is the largest urban brownfield in theUnited States. Its massive ruins and tainted soil covermore than a hundred acres at the heart of the city.

Lehigh University is located in the middle of SouthBethlehem. Founded in the 1860s, Lehighs earlydevelopment was closely tied to Bethlehem Steel. Itproduced both the engineers and technical knowledgethat made Bethlehem Steel one of the most profitablesteel producers in the world. In turn, the company gavethe university large sums of money, from its foundinggift onward. Steel executives played a dominant roleon the Board of Trustees from the universitys foundinguntil late in the twentieth century. The building of anelite, private research university also played an impor-tant symbolic role for the Steels managerial class, as away of accumulating and displaying cultural capital.Yet Lehigh largely closed its doors to the working peo-

ple of South Bethlehem, who rarely hfinancial or educational resources admission. These dynamics led to entrpatterns of towngown class segregatiare common in university towns anacross the country.

An important episode in utycommunity relations began in the 1Lehigh expanded its campus. Like manprivate, urban universities (the UniveChicago is a parallel case, as Danielle

UPS Foundation Professor in the ScSocial Science, has shown), Lehigh closely with the city government to eminent domain powers in the name orenewal. The city declared portionadjacent working-class neighborhood ed, seized whole blocks of houses, athem to the university, which razed thand built new sections of its campus wneighbors had been living.

Over the last twenty years, Lehtaken steps to develop more positive rwith its urban neighbors, pursuing st

similar to those employed by other private univThese well-intentioned efforts have produced soitive results, but they have been haunted by the hof segregation they have sought to address, a

have been weakened by inadequate attention totent, underlying power relations. Like other wuniversities, Lehigh has tended to oscillate bviewing its poorer neighbors as a potential dangpoliced or as beneficiaries of charity. Rarely hasable to recognize its neighbors as partners in edand democracy.

This was the state of affairs in 2004, when thBethlehem arrived at a momentous turning poina decade of abandonment, the Steel site was puin 2004 by a New Yorkbased real-estate congloThe major stakeholder proved to be the LasSands corporation, which successfully acqlicense to open a casino in the middle of the bro(The state of Pennsylvania had just legalized casinbling as a strategy for postindustrial urban and rredevelopment.) Competing positive and nclaims about the project circulated. City officSands executives asserted that the casino wouldate tax revenue, would create jobs, had the resodevelop the site, and would foster urban redment. Critics asserted that the casino would brinand prostitution; that the city would be overrunfic; that it would create urban blight and the colretail districts and neighborhoods, including few blocks from Lehighs campus. Bethlehem rhad mixed responses: some were hopeful, othefied. But there was, at least in my experience, a vuniversal sense of powerlessness: people felt thwould have no role in making decisions abfuture of the Steel site, around which their lirevolved for generations, or about the future of more generally.

It was in this context, three years ago, tlaunched the South Side Initiative (SSI). A gLehigh faculty (mostly in the humanities and soences, but some from the natural sciences, beducation, and engineering) began to meet wimunity leaders and residents in order to undwhat role the university might play at this moextraordinary change in the city. In response we learned, SSI developed a range of activities agrams. These were, in many respects, familiausual functioning of a university. We brought inspeakers, held public events (forums, conferencseries, public art projects), organized classes, anongoing working groups. All of these activities, focused on topics of pressing concern in the c

Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy

Seth Moglen, Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member in the School of SocialScience, presents his research on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at a seminar series organized byJoan Wallach Scott (far left), Harold F. Linder Professor in the School.

ANDREA

KANE

(Continued o

Universities in our time can function asengines of democracy. They can foster the

production, preservation, and disseminationof knowledge about the most urgent problems

we face, locally as well as globally.


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philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, pedagogical experts,anthropologists, and historians working on various aspects of education. We met as ourown group every other week to present our works-in-progress to each other.

For my part, I confessed to the group, early and often, that I was a newcomer to theeducation topic. Last September, I was much more acquainted with the literatures onincome inequality, racial exclusion, and gender-sensitive approaches to justice. As Isettled into my office, I got started on my current project: a philosophical analysis of arecent school-finance case, Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. In this case,low-income plaintiffs from New York City successfully sued the state of New York forfailing to provide an adequate kindergarten through twelfth-grade education, as guar-anteed to them under the state constitution. My hunch is that we political theorists

can learn a lot of valuable lessons from this case, insofar asit gives us an opportunity to study exactly how disputes overjustice and equality in the distribution of public educationalresources are being worked out in the courts. (John J. KerrJr., a member of the IAS Friends Executive Committee, is aPartner at Simpson Thacher; his law firm provided invalu-able pro-bono legal services for the low-income childrenwho brought their complaint before the state court.)

Having very little background on education issues at the outset, I immersed myself inmy colleagues work. In our work-in-progress meetings, we discussed a Members study onthe barriers to graduation at community colleges; the value of approaches orientedtoward creative, dialogical, and higher-order thinking for teaching children about sci-ence; the strengths and weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind approach topupil performance and accountability; the surprising results from a Members study onparental involvement in the day-to-day learning experiences of low-income pupils; orthe advantages and disadvantages of granting elected local school boards substantialcontrol over education-policy decision-making. As a participant in our theme Mem-

bers sessions, I navigated an especially steep learning curve, but my colleagues encour-aged my emerging arguments and ideas with unflagging generosity and good humor.

In the second ring of the Dewey Seminar, Danielle and Rob brought a handful of theMembers working on the education theme together with outside participants in a three-stage anthology project. Participants in the anthology project from outside the Instituteincluded school-finance economists; a law professor and an education professor specializ-ing in religious accommodation in schools; political philosophers working on theories ofdemocracy, equality, and the right to education; a leading policy expert from a prominentthink tank; and a director of an education research institute. We met at the Institute onthree occasions over the course of twelve months. At each one-week workshop, we pre-sented our works-in-progress to each other. The projects format gave each of us an oppor-tunity to solicit in-depth commentaries on our chapter drafts from specialists coming from

diverse disciplinary perspectives. Our goal is to produce an interdisciplinary and setting scholarly book on education, under Danielle and Robs joint editorship.

In the Dewey Seminars third ring, as it were, Danielle and Rob brought a fof leading practitioners to the Institute campus to make presentations to the Mworking on the education theme. These visitors range from district superintand college presidents to leading intellectuals at cutting-edge think tanks, cltechnology entrepreneurs, charter-school founders and teachers, a legal advoca judge deeply involved in the state school-finance cases, and senior figures fromphilanthropic foundations that are operating significant grant programs in coopwith various public school systems.

One visitor invited a group of Members to New York City to spend a day in th

room with immigrant children learning to speak, rewrite the English language. To say our visit was an eying experience would be a vast understatement. Ttook to the road a second time. Seth Moglen, a Memthe education theme group, led us on a tour of the meted South Side Initiativea community partnershiping Lehigh University and the residents of BetPennsylvania (see article, page 8).

From our exchanges with these dynamic, engaged, and diverse practitionfrom our impromptu road trips, we learned a great deal about what is workinjust as importantly, what is not working in our public schools today. By the enlike I had been brought so close to the major policy action on the state and fedeels that I could anticipate the education headline stories of the week featNational Public Radio broadcasts or the front pages of the New York Times.

As the year draws to a close, it is difficult for me to provide an adequate pormy experience as a participant in the Dewey Seminar. With the generous supporInstitute, I have rubbed elbows with social scientists who know how our curren

tion policies actually work and practitioners who breathe life into our abstract ithe ground. It is one thing to study the philosophy of education in the company ostorytellers; it is quite another to teach a special-education class or to organize a breaking professional development course for eighth-grade biology teachers. I willgrating the extraordinarily rich and inspirational lessons that I have learned in thSeminar into my own research activities and university teaching for years to com

each was organized to foster opportunities for faculty and students to come togetherwith community members to exchange different forms of knowledge and to deliberateon local challenges.

We brought in leading scholars, for example, who could share the results of theirresearch about the actual effects of casino development in towns and cities elsewherein the United States. At these well-attended public events, community members aswell as faculty and students exchanged questions and concerns with public officials andvisiting experts. Local journalists reported on the dialogue and on pressing policy issuessuch as real-estate speculation, protection of local business, and hiring practices at thecasino. This last issue became especially salient when African American and Latinocommunity members emphasized their experience with racialized hiring practices thathave resulted in casinos in other cities hiring mainly white and often nonlocal staff,especially in better-paid casino floor positions. In response, SSI collaborated with alocal economic development group to sponsor a series of public information sessionsabout jobs at the casino. We wanted these sessions to demystify the security screen-ing process, which research has shown to be the main mechanism for reducing minor-ity job applications. The sessions were conducted bilingually to accommodateBethlehems large Spanish-speaking immigrant population, and they were attended byhundreds of South Side residents. Through the sharing of scholarly expertise and localknowledge, SSI was thus able to collaborate with a local nonprofit to maximize oppor-tunities for local employment.

Over the last three years, SSI has offered dozens of courses across the humanities,social sciences, and natural sciences focused on the city of Bethlehemsome of themteam-taught by Lehigh faculty and community partners. Thousands of people atLehigh and across the city have participated in our public forums, conferences, classes,and other events. Lehigh faculty and students are collaborating with communitymembers to produce research on issues from economic development to environmentaljustice to public history. Cultivating processes of intellectual desegregation, we seek toexpand the public sphere in the city, enabling people of all kinds to share knowledgeand to invent democratic practices to meet our common needs.

Universities in our time can function as engines of democracy. This is not a casual

observation. Even as democracy remains a foundational value in our society, wa moment of widespread pessimism about its effective, meaningful practice in thed States. As low voter turnout suggests, faith in the electoral process is distulow. And even as ordinary people doubt their ability to influence Congress or sislatures or city councils, most Americans have little experience actively deliband participating in collective decision-making about issues that immediatelthem, where they live or work or learn.

A generation ago, the cultural critic and political thinker Raymond Wdescribed democracy as a long revolution in Western societies. He insisteven in the second half of the twentieth century, we were still at an early slearning the practices of democracyand that one of the most urgent tasksocieties was to invent and cultivate such practices. That task is more urgenthan ever.

My own experience in Bethlehem over the last three years has convinced muniversities canif they chooseplay an important role in this ongoing procecan foster the production, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge about turgent problems we face, locally as well as globally. They can bring people tognot merely students and teachers, but people throughout their wider communideliberate. They have the resources, stature, and influence to bring governmenttogether with the people who have elected themor to bring corporate devtogether with the people whose community is in the process of transformationcan disseminate knowledge more widely, more variouslyand, oddly enouglocallythan they currently do. They can, in short, help us become more ansto one another. I

9

Seth Moglen, Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the South Side Iniat Lehigh University, was the 200910 Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Min the School of Social Science. This article is based on a Friends Forum talk giv

April 28. A video of the full talk is available online at www.ias.edu/people/friends

DEWEY SEMINAR (Continued from page 1)

BETHLEHEM (Continued from page 8)

Anna Marie Smith, a Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell Univewas the 200910 Rosanna and Charles Jaffin Founders Circle Member in the Sof Social Science. Financial support for the Dewey Seminar was provided by the SpFoundation and the Ford Foundation.

From our exchanges with these practitioners,and from our impromptu road trips, we

learned a great deal about what is working,and, just as importantly, what is notworking in our public schools today.


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BY JACK F. MATLOCK JR.

Several years ago, I was increasingly dis-turbed by the direction taken by Amer-ican foreign and domestic policy. It seemedto me that many key actions were inspiredby mistaken notions about the way theCold War ended and the causes and impli-cations of the Soviet collapse. Lessons thatI, a witness to those events from senior lev-

els of government, thought were obviouswere either ignored or turned on theirhead, and broad theories with little footingin reality seemed to dominate the thinkingof policy makers, both in the United Statesand in other countries.

Having described the development ofAmerican policy that produced a negoti-ated end to the Cold War in Reagan andGorbachev: How the Cold War Ended(2004), and recounted the way the SovietUnion fragmented into fifteen successorstates in Autopsy on an Empire (1995), Iresolved to describe the lessons I woulddraw from the geopolitically seismicevents of 198891, and to consider how American pol-icy might still profit from a better understanding of

those events.My thoughts are set forth in Superpower Illusions:

How Myths and False Ideologies Led America AstrayAndHow to Return to Reality, published by Yale UniversityPress (2010). In it I argue that myths about the way theCold War ended, along with ideologies divorced fromreality, led America into a series of blunders that drainedits power and increased the dangers to its national secu-rity. I would summarize some of these mistaken ideas asfollows:

Myth #1: The Cold War ended with the collapse ofthe Soviet Union.

NO! It ended well before the Soviet Union broke up.

Myth #2: Military and economic pressure destroyedCommunist rule in the USSR.

NO! Mikhail Gorbachev undermined the Partyscontrol of the country because it was blocking thereforms he considered necessary.

Myth #3: The USSR collapsed under pressure fromthe United States and its allies.

NO! Internal contradictions caused its collapse, notexternal pressure.

These myths stem from a tendency to conflate threegeopolitically seismic events that were separate, thoughconnected:I The end of the Cold War (198889)I Weakening of Communist Party control of the

USSR (198991)I Breakup of the Soviet Union (December 1991)

The Cold War ended peacefully, by negotiation, onterms that were in the interest of a reforming SovietUnion. President Reagan had defined the terms of set-tlement on the basis of common interests. In time, Gor-bachev accepted his agenda, since it was in the Sovietinterest. As Gorbachev subsequently observed, We allwon the Cold War.

The end of the arms race permitted Gorbachev toconcentrate on reform at home, which in turn led to hisending the Communist Partys monopoly of power, usingcontested elections as a major tool. President Reaganrecognized, and stated publicly, that Gorbachevs SovietUnion was no longer an evil empire.

While the United States supported the restoration ofindependence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, itfavored Gorbachevs effort to create a voluntary federa-

tion of the remaining twelve union republics. Thebreakup of the USSR, caused by internal factors, was a

defeat for American policy, not a victory.Myth #4: Russia was defeated in the Cold War.

NO! Todays Russian Federation was not a party tothe Cold War. It was part of a Communist-ruledempire. Its elected leaders in 1990 and 1991 werestrongly pro-Western and aspired to replace commu-nist with democratic values.

Myth #5: The Cold War should be considered WorldWar III.

NO WAY! Cold War is a metaphor, not the realthing. There was never any direct combat betweenthe United States and its allies with the SovietUnion. If there had been, we would probably not behere today to write about it.

The myths are also connected with the mistaken notionof superpower. The United States and the USSR wereconsidered superpowers because they had the means todestroy the world. They were not superpowers in thesense that they could change the world using their supe-rior military power. The end of the Cold War dimin-ished American power since much of it had derived fromits ability to defend countries against Communistaggression and infiltration. The world did not suddenlybecome unipolar; there was not even a unipolarmoment. (So far as the power to destroy the world isconcerned, the United States and Russia both still havethat capability with their nuclear arsenals.)

While not a superpower in the sense that it couldsuccessfully rule other countries, the United Statesemerged from the Cold War the preeminent power inthe world. It had the opportunity to create a safer world

by strengthening international strto deal with local conflicts, failedorganized crime, and the threat of teIt had the opportunity to reduce its commitments abroad (there was noa Soviet Union to contain) and to ate the destruction of nuclear wstarted by Reagan, Bush I, and GorNevertheless, the Clinton adminilacking a coherent strategy, was dralocal conflicts not vital to U.S. secu

without UN Security Council authfailed to bring Russia into the Eusecurity structure as a responsible and treated it as a defeated natioundermining the prospects for demthere and Russias full cooperation ing with global issues.

If the Clinton administrationopportunities, the BushCheney atration destroyed them. Having warnings of an impending terrorison the United Stateswhich coshould have been preventedit Iraq without adequate cause or internsanction, ignored or withdrew from

commitments, stalled verified nuclear arms redand took a series of actions that encouraged rath

deterred nuclear weapons proliferation. It is iroa president who professed to admire President followed policies that were often the oppositeboth in substance and in execution.

Myths about the Cold War and its end cowith theories taken to logical but unrealistic eundermined Americas strength at home. Markementalism ruled the day and loosening of conbanks and financial markets contributed to the sububble and a near collapse of the financial sy2008. Tax cuts despite two wars produced an udented budget deficit, and the country as a wholto live beyond its means, even as education anstructure were allowed to deteriorate. The Unitebecame the worlds largest debtor at the very timexperiencing the woes of imperial overstretch.

Meanwhile what passed for political debate awas reduced to distorted slogans. The very meamany terms came under assault. There is nothinservative about running large budget deficits, incountries that are no direct and imminent threexaggerating and sometimes fabricating intereports, yet political spinmasters convinced a sigportion of the public that radical, high-risk, aillegal policies were conservative. In fact, foreicy cannot be calibrated on a conservativescale, and neither can many domestic issues.

The Obama administration has made a start, the ship of state toward a more constructive cosuch areas as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, weapon issues in Iran and North Korea, relatioRussia, nuclear arms reduction, missile defense, IsraeliPalestinian problem. Though President has, in general, set a moderate course of changecles both abroad and at home are substantial. must deal with damage to the nation inherited fradministrations and overcome entrenched speciestssome in his own administrationthachange. Nevertheless, the change of course that in the recent agreement with Russia to eliminastrategic nuclear missiles in a verifiable fashion ha signal achievement. I

A Distorted View of History Led America Astray

Jack F. Matlock Jr. was George F. Kennan Profin the School of Historical Studies from 1996 to and U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from to 1991.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan meets with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during theReykjavik Summit in October 1986. Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was then Special Assistant to thePresident and Senior Director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council, isat the far right. In 1987, he became U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

REAGAN

PRESIDENTIALLIBRARY

The Cold War ended peacefully, bynegotiation, on terms that were in theinterest of a reforming Soviet Union.

President Reagan had defined the terms ofsettlement on the basis of common interests.

In time, Gorbachev accepted his agenda,since it was in the Soviet interest.

As Gorbachev subsequently observed,We all won the Cold War.


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functoriality beyond endoscopy, which only analyzesrepresentations of G in terms of representations of itsendoscopic groups. For Langlands, it is not the funda-mental lemma that is critical for the analytic theory ofautomorphic forms and for the arithmetic of Shimuravarieties; it is the stabilized (or stable) automorphictrace formula that the fundamental lemma now estab-lishes, namely, the reduction of the Arthur-Selberg traceformula to a stable trace formula for a group and itsendoscopic groups, as well as the stabilization of the geo-metric Grothendieck-Lefschetz trace formula. None ofthese are possible without the fundamental lemma, andits absence rendered progress almost impossible for morethan twenty years, comments Langlands. I hope thatwith the fundamental lemma at hand we will see in thecoming years great progress both with functoriality andwith the general theory of Shimura varieties.

In the past year, Langlands and Ng wrote a paperwith former Member Edward Frenkel (to be published in

Annales des sciences mathmatiques du Qubec) in whichthe stable trace formula allows the introduction of theSteinberg-Hitchin base and of the Poisson summationformula.12 They observe a close relationship betweenthe trace formula and Beilinson-Drinfelds conjecture in

the geometric Langlands program. In a related work,13

Frenkel and Witten have used the mirror symmetry ofthe Hitchin fibrations to expose the special role playedby endoscopy in the geometric Langlands correspon-dence. This correspondence has been interpreted as themirror symmetry of the Hitchin fibrations for two dualreductive groups.

Speaking of Ngs geometric interpretation of theidentities of orbital integrals for his proof of the lemma,Langlands says, I am only very, very slowly coming toappreciate that Ngs point of view on orbital integralsmight supplement in important ways, maybe even re-place, that of Harish-Chandras. Certainly, it will be im-portant for many other m

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