Many of the public lectures, conferences, seminars, and workshops that have been held at the Institute for Advanced Study are available for viewing on these pages. Selected talks are highlighted below, and you may also search for others by subject, School, or year via the side menu.

  
Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian's Craft, Today    
What is the relationship between the idiom of the observer (historian, anthropologist) and the idiom of the actors, dead or alive? This question, which has been addressed from widely different (and usually unrelated) points of view, provides an oblique approach to the cognitive, moral, and political implications of the historian’s craft today. Carlo Ginzburg, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, reflects on the historian's craft.
  
For more talks related to the School of Historical Studies, see a complete listing of videos here.
  
 
 
   
Education and Equality
Current educational policy discussions frequently invoke “equality” as the reigning ideal. But how clear a view do we have of what we mean by this? What exactly are we trying to achieve? In this lecture, Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science, revisits the question of how to understand the ideal of equality in the context of educational policy.
  
For more talks related to the School of Social Science, see a complete listing of videos here.
 
 

  
 
 
Randomness and Pseudorandomness 
Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, gave a Friends Forum in October 2011, entitled Randomness and Pseudo-randomness. Is the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps more importantly, can we tell the difference between the two? A computational theory of pseudo-randomness, developed in the past three decades, reveals (perhaps counter-intuitively) that very little is lost in such deterministic or weakly random worlds, since what seems like perfect randomness can be created deterministically. In this talk, Wigderson explains the main ideas and results of this theory. To learn more about the Friends, please visit the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study.
   
For more talks related to the School of Mathematics, see a complete listing of videos here.
 
   
Knots and Quantum Theory
A knot is more or less what you think it is—a tangled mess of string in ordinary three-dimensional space. In the twentieth century, mathematicians developed a rich and deep theory of knots. And surprisingly, as Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, explains in this lecture, it turned out that many of the most interesting ideas about knots have their roots in quantum physics.
  
For more talks related to the School of Natural Sciences, see a complete listing of videos here.