Founders Day program includes dedication of sculpture.
By: David Campbell
The Institute for Advanced Study held a special ceremony Friday morning to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its founding and mark the centenary of Albert Einstein’s miracle year in 1905, when the famed theorist one of the institute’s first faculty members published several papers that revolutionized physics.
The rain fell steadily on the morning of the ceremony, at which a sculpture by New York artist Elyn Zimmerman a design featuring three curved and suspended granite panels that appear from a distance to be a sinuous bench floating amid the trees was formally unveiled and dedicated.
Due to the weather, the Founders Day ceremony was held indoors at the institute’s Wolfensohn Hall. Institute Director Peter Goddard presided over the commemorative ceremony, which marked 75 years since the signing of the institute’s certificate of incorporation on May 20, 1930.
Speakers Friday morning included Dr. Goddard; Princeton Township Mayor Phyllis Marchand; Mercer County Executive Brian M. Hughes; state Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing); and institute trustee Robert B. Menschel. Comments by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12), who could not be present, also were read.
Ms. Zimmerman was present for the commemorative events Friday. Following the dedicatory ceremony in the morning, a series of lectures on Einstein and the institute were held throughout the day in Wolfensohn Hall.
"Since its founding in 1930, the institute has remained true to the mission set by its founders of providing an environment where curiosity-driven research into fundamental questions in the sciences and the humanities can flourish," Dr. Goddard said.
Ms. Marchand said of the institute: "This is a place where challenges have always been met. This is a place to think."
Mr. Hughes said the Institute Woods on the border of which the new sculpture has been installed near the southern edge of the Institute pond was a place for quiet reflection and contemplation.
Assemblywoman Watson Coleman said of the institute: "This is a very unique place in this country and the world a place that values thinking for the value of thinking."
Dr. Goddard said the sculpture by Ms. Zimmerman "embodies one of the important things the institute offers to scholars the ability to take time and sit and contemplate in beautiful surroundings."
The sculpture consists of three curved granite panels totaling 40 feet in length, suspended from and surrounded by groupings of stainless steel poles of varying heights and thickness. Situated on the southern edge of the pond on the woods’ edge, the sculpture blends in with the natural environment.
The sculpture was made possible through a charitable gift from Mr. Menschel, who is a senior director at Goldman Sachs and president of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the institute said.
Ms. Zimmerman’s large-scale outdoor projects for private and public institutions include works at the National Geographic Society in Washington; O’Hare International Center in Chicago; and a fountain memorial for the victims of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which was later destroyed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the institute said.
Each of the sculpture’s three stone benches bears an inscribed quotation from three key figures in the institute’s history. They are educator Abraham Flexner, whose vision inspired the institute’s founding and who served as the first director there from 1930 to 1939; Einstein, who came to Princeton in 1933 to join the institute, where he remained until his death in 1955; and diplomat and author George F. Kennan, who joined the institute in 1956 and remained there until his death in March, the institute said.
The institute was founded in 1930 with a gift from New Jersey businessman and philanthropist Louis Bamberger of Bamberger’s department stores and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld.
A permanent faculty of 26 scholars guides the work of the institute’s four schools historical studies, mathematics, natural sciences and social science and each year awards fellowships to 190 visiting members from about 100 universities and research institutions throughout the world, the institute said.
Throughout the year, the institute is marking its 75th anniversary with a series of events celebrating the work of its four schools, as well as its founders and Einstein.
The events coincide with the centenary of Einstein’s "annus mirabilis," his miracle year in 1905 when, as a virtually unknown Swiss patent clerk, he published his seminal papers on special relativity, Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, the last of which earned him a Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.
This year is also the 50th anniversary of Einstein’s death and the World Year of Physics.

