Why Did Einstein End Up in Princeton?

When Albert Einstein arrived in Princeton in October 1933, fleeing Nazi Germany at the age of 54, he was the most famous scientist in the world. He could have settled almost anywhere. Oxford had offered him a position. The California Institute of Technology had courted him for years. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was building a department around him. Instead he chose a town of 7,000 people in central New Jersey, took a job at an institution that had existed for only three years, and lived there for the remaining 22 years of his life. The house at 112 Mercer Street, where he lived from 1936 until his death in 1955, is still standing — a private residence, not open to the public, but visible from the sidewalk. The walk from the house to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study was about a mile and a half through residential Princeton.

For an international visitor walking around Princeton today, the question of why Einstein ended up here is genuinely interesting. The town itself is small and unimposing. There is no obvious cluster of physics infrastructure, no immediately visible reason that the most famous scientist of the 20th century chose this particular New Jersey suburb over the world's other available options. The answer turns out to be one specific institution and one very specific moment in academic history. The institution is the Institute for Advanced Study. The moment was 1930. The story of why Einstein ended up in Princeton is also the story of how Princeton became, almost overnight, one of the densest research environments in the world.

This article walks through what the IAS is, why it was founded the way it was, who else gathered there, and what the place looks like today for a visitor walking the grounds.

The Institute Was Founded to Be Different

The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner, a reformer of American higher education, with funding from Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, who had recently sold their Newark department store to R.H. Macy and Company and were looking for an institutional cause to donate the proceeds to. Flexner had a specific theory about what was wrong with American academia in the 1920s: even at the great research universities, the most distinguished scholars were burdened with teaching, committee work, administrative obligations, and student supervision to a degree that fragmented their thinking. The greatest intellectual achievements, Flexner argued, came from sustained, undistracted, deep work. American universities did not provide that environment.

Flexner's solution was the Institute. It would have permanent faculty (initially in mathematics, then expanding to natural sciences, historical studies, and social science). It would have visiting scholars staying for periods ranging from a few months to a full year. It would have no students. No undergraduates. No graduate students seeking advisors. No formal teaching. No degree programs. No departments in the traditional sense. The faculty would be expected to do nothing but their own research and to converse with each other and with the visiting scholars. The Institute would pay them well, give them office space, give them library access (initially through a partnership with Princeton University, which sat across town), and otherwise leave them alone.

Flexner founded the institution by recruiting the best mathematicians he could find. The first three permanent faculty members were Oswald Veblen, John von Neumann (then 27 years old), and Hermann Weyl. Each was already considered one of the most important mathematicians of the era. Flexner's pitch — full salary, no teaching, freedom to think — was unusually attractive at a moment when European universities were beginning to fall under political pressure and American universities were still saturating their faculty with teaching loads.

When Einstein began considering leaving Germany in early 1932, before the Nazi takeover that would have made his position untenable in any event, Flexner traveled to Berlin and made the same offer. Einstein accepted. He moved to Princeton in October 1933.

What the Place Actually Looks Like

The IAS sits on roughly 800 acres south of the Princeton University campus. The main administrative building, Fuld Hall, is a Georgian Revival brick structure built in 1939, four years after the Institute moved to its permanent campus. The building's central hall, lined with photographs of past faculty and visiting members, is open during business hours; the Institute dining hall and library wings extend from it.

Behind Fuld Hall the grounds open into the Institute Pond and the Institute Woods — second-growth forest that the Institute owns and maintains as walking grounds, deliberately preserved as the kind of environment Flexner thought conducive to thinking. There are paths through the woods, benches by the pond, and, on a clear day, a remarkable amount of birdsong. Walking the grounds is one of the better hour-long activities in Princeton; the IAS welcomes the public to its campus and trails.

The Institute's faculty offices are clustered in Simons Hall (mathematics), Bloomberg Hall (natural sciences), and the historical and social science wings. The Wolfensohn Hall auditorium hosts public lectures throughout the academic year — physics colloquia, history seminars, occasional public events. The lectures are free and often open to outsiders; the calendar is published on the IAS website.

There is no Einstein museum, no formal commemoration, no statue. The Institute treats Einstein as one of many distinguished members rather than as a tourist attraction. His office in Fuld Hall was a small, ordinary academic office; it has been used continuously by other faculty since his death and is not preserved as a memorial.

Who Else Was There

Einstein was the IAS's most famous member, but he was far from alone. The Institute's mathematics faculty in the 1930s and 1940s included John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, Marston Morse, Oswald Veblen, and visiting members including Kurt Gödel (who would join the permanent faculty in 1953), Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing (visiting in 1936-38). The school of natural sciences hosted J. Robert Oppenheimer as director from 1947 to 1966; under his directorship the Institute became, in addition to a mathematics center, a major theoretical physics community.

The story of the relationship between Einstein and Gödel is one of the IAS's enduring tales. Einstein and Gödel walked together to and from the Institute almost every day during the years when both were on campus. Einstein had said, late in his life, that he came to the Institute only to "have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel." The two men, both Central European, both isolated from much of American intellectual life, both productive of foundational work, formed an unlikely and now-famous friendship. Photographs of them walking the path between Fuld Hall and 112 Mercer Street are some of the most reproduced images of 20th-century intellectual history.

Oppenheimer's tenure as IAS director (1947–1966) overlapped with Einstein's last years. Oppenheimer arrived from Los Alamos, where he had directed the Manhattan Project; he came to Princeton partly to escape the conflict over his security clearance and partly because the IAS offered the only American intellectual environment that suited his postwar interests. His house at Olden Manor — the IAS director's residence on the grounds — was where he hosted the unusual mix of physicists, economists, historians, and visiting public figures who came through during the early Cold War.

The relationship between the IAS and Princeton University is worth understanding. The two institutions are not formally connected. They share a town. Many IAS faculty have informal connections to Princeton departments; many Princeton faculty cross-attend IAS seminars; the libraries cooperate. But the IAS is not part of the university. Its budget, its admissions of visiting members, its faculty hires, and its institutional decisions are independent. For an international visitor, this is the single most counterintuitive thing about the place: two world-class research institutions sitting two miles apart in a small town and operating as separate worlds.

What Visiting the IAS Looks Like

The Institute is open to the public during normal business hours. There is no admission fee, no ticket booth, no orientation desk. You arrive at the front entrance off Einstein Drive (yes, the IAS-internal road is named after him), park in the visitor lot, and walk in.

A reasonable visit is about 90 minutes:

• Fuld Hall: Walk into the main hall. The central staircase, the photographs of past faculty, and the public reading rooms are available to look at. The IAS is quiet; this is a working research institution, and visitors are expected to keep voices low.
• The grounds and pond: Walk out the back door of Fuld Hall, past the Institute Pond, and into the Institute Woods. The trail network is unmarked but easy to follow; loops of 30 minutes to an hour are common.
• The connection to the Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath: Several informal paths from Institute Woods connect to the canal towpath. From the canal you can walk back toward Carnegie Lake and the southern edge of the Princeton campus.
• The Institute store and bookshop: Small, quiet, with a curated selection of books by IAS faculty and visiting members. Not a bookstore in the commercial sense; more a faculty-and-visitor amenity that happens to be open to the public.

If a public lecture happens to be scheduled during your visit, attending one is the best way to understand what the Institute does. The lectures are technical (physics colloquia are at research level; history seminars assume substantial background), but the experience of being in the Wolfensohn auditorium with 80 specialists from around the world is the closest thing to seeing the IAS function as it was designed to.

The Einstein house at 112 Mercer Street is a private residence. It is not open to the public, has no museum, and the current owners have asked visitors to be respectful. You can walk past on the sidewalk — the house is a modest two-story white wooden Colonial Revival, set back from the street with a fenced yard. There is no sign indicating that Einstein lived there.

What the IAS's Existence Tells You About Princeton

The IAS's presence has shaped Princeton in ways that are easy to miss on a first visit. The town has an unusual concentration of academic spouses, retired faculty, and visiting scholars who are neither students nor university employees but who are connected to the broader intellectual community. The bookstores, lecture halls, and public events on both sides of Nassau Street operate at a register that assumes a more academically engaged audience than a typical 30,000-person town would have. The university benefits from the visiting members who pass through Princeton and end up at university seminars or at department dinners; the Institute benefits from the university's library, dining, and student life that absorb its visiting members during their stays.

For an international student or applicant, the IAS is also a useful reference point for what kind of research culture Princeton operates within. The university's faculty are not isolated. They participate in a broader community that includes the IAS, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory twenty minutes east, and the cluster of biotech and pharmaceutical research that has grown along US Route 1 between Princeton and New Brunswick. The town is deceptively small for the density of research it contains.

The walk from Nassau Hall south through the campus, across Carnegie Lake, down to the IAS grounds, and into the Institute Woods is one of the most informative ninety minutes any visitor can spend in central New Jersey. It is also more or less the path Einstein walked between his house and his office, with deviations as the residential streets have changed but not the basic geography. He did this five days a week for 22 years. The path is still there. The town is still there. The Institute is still there, doing more or less what Flexner designed it to do in 1930.