Pi Day is coming up! Mathematicians around the world celebrate on March 14th because the date represents the first three digits of π: 3.14.
In Princeton, Pi Day is a huge event even for the non-mathematicians among us, given that March 14 is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the German Empire. He turns 139 this year! If you’re in the Princeton area and want to celebrate, check out some of the festivities happening around town:
Saturday, 3/10/18
- Apple Pie Eating Contest, 9:00 a.m., McCaffrey’s (301 North Harrison Street). Arrive by 8:45 a.m. to participate.
- Einstein in Princeton Guided Walking Tour, 10:00 a.m. Call Princeton Tour Company at (855) 743-1415 for details.
- Einstein Look-A-Like Contest, 12:00 p.m., Nassau Inn. Arrive early to get a spot to watch this standing-room-only event!
- Pi Recitation Contest, 1:30 p.m., Prince William Ballroom, Nassau Inn. Children ages 12 and younger may compete. Register by 1:15 p.m.
- Pie Throwing Event, 3:14 p.m., Palmer Square. Proceeds to benefit the Princeton Educational Fund Teacher Mini-Grant Program.
- Cupcake Decorating Competition, 4:00 p.m., House of Cupcakes (34 Witherspoon Street). The winner receives one free cupcake each month for the rest of the year.
Wednesday, 3/14/18
- Princeton School Gardens Cooperative Fundraiser, 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., The Bent Spoon (35 Palmer Square West) and Lillipies (301 North Harrison Street). All proceeds from your afternoon treat will be donated to the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative.
- Pi Day Pop Up Wedding/Vow Renewal Ceremonies, 3:14 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Princeton Pi (84 Nassau Street). You must pre-register by contacting the Princeton Tour Company.
Not into crowds, or pie? You can also celebrate this multifaceted holiday by picking up one of PUP’s many books about Albert Einstein! In 1922, Princeton University Press published Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity, his first book produced by an American publisher. Since then, we’ve published numerous works by and about Einstein.
The books and collections highlighted here celebrate not only his scientific accomplishments but also his personal reflections and his impact on present-day scholarship and technology. Check them out and learn about Einstein’s interpersonal relationships, his musings on travel, his theories of time, and his legacy for the 21st century.
Volume 15 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, forthcoming in April 2018, covers one of the most thrilling two-year periods in twentieth-century physics, as matrix mechanics—developed chiefly by W. Heisenberg, M. Born, and P. Jordan—and wave mechanics—developed by E. Schrödinger—supplanted the earlier quantum theory. The almost one hundred writings by Einstein, of which a third have never been published, and the more than thirteen hundred letters show Einstein’s immense productivity and hectic pace of life.
Einstein quickly grasps the conceptual peculiarities involved in the new quantum mechanics, such as the difference between Schrödinger’s wave function and a field defined in spacetime, or the emerging statistical interpretation of both matrix and wave mechanics. Inspired by correspondence with G. Y. Rainich, he investigates with Jakob Grommer the problem of motion in general relativity, hoping for a hint at a new avenue to unified field theory.
Readers can access Volumes 1-14 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein online at The Digital Einstein Papers, an exciting new free, open-access website that brings the writings of the twentieth century’s most influential scientist to a wider audience than ever before. This unique, authoritative resource provides full public access to the complete transcribed, annotated, and translated contents of each print volume of the Collected Papers. The volumes are published by Princeton University Press, sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and supported by the California Institute of Technology. Volumes 1-14 of The Collected Papers cover the first forty-six years of Einstein’s life, up to and including the years immediately before the final formulation of new quantum mechanics. The contents of each new volume will be added to the website approximately eighteen months after print publication. Eventually, the website will provide access to all of Einstein’s writings and correspondence accompanied by scholarly annotation and apparatus, which are expected to fill thirty volumes.
The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein is the first publication of Albert Einstein’s 1922 travel diary to the Far East and Middle East, regions that the renowned physicist had never visited before. Einstein’s lengthy itinerary consisted of stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, two brief stays in China, a six-week whirlwind lecture tour of Japan, a twelve-day tour of Palestine, and a three-week visit to Spain. This handsome edition makes available, for the first time, the complete journal that Einstein kept on this momentous journey.
The telegraphic-style diary entries—quirky, succinct, and at times irreverent—record Einstein’s musings on science, philosophy, art, and politics, as well as his immediate impressions and broader thoughts on such events as his inaugural lecture at the future site of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a garden party hosted by the Japanese Empress, an audience with the King of Spain, and meetings with other prominent colleagues and statesmen. Entries also contain passages that reveal Einstein’s stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race. This beautiful edition features stunning facsimiles of the diary’s pages, accompanied by an English translation, an extensive historical introduction, numerous illustrations, and annotations. Supplementary materials include letters, postcards, speeches, and articles, a map of the voyage, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.
Einstein would go on to keep a journal for all succeeding trips abroad, and this first volume of his travel diaries offers an initial, intimate glimpse into a brilliant mind encountering the great, wide world.
More than fifty years after his death, Albert Einstein’s vital engagement with the world continues to inspire others, spurring conversations, projects, and research, in the sciences as well as the humanities. Einstein for the 21st Century shows us why he remains a figure of fascination.
In this wide-ranging collection, eminent artists, historians, scientists, and social scientists describe Einstein’s influence on their work, and consider his relevance for the future. Scientists discuss how Einstein’s vision continues to motivate them, whether in their quest for a fundamental description of nature or in their investigations in chaos theory; art scholars and artists explore his ties to modern aesthetics; a music historian probes Einstein’s musical tastes and relates them to his outlook in science; historians explore the interconnections between Einstein’s politics, physics, and philosophy; and other contributors examine his impact on the innovations of our time. Uniquely cross-disciplinary, Einstein for the 21st Century serves as a testament to his legacy and speaks to everyone with an interest in his work.
The contributors are Leon Botstein, Lorraine Daston, E. L. Doctorow, Yehuda Elkana, Yaron Ezrahi, Michael L. Friedman, Jürg Fröhlich, Peter L. Galison, David Gross, Hanoch Gutfreund, Linda D. Henderson, Dudley Herschbach, Gerald Holton, Caroline Jones, Susan Neiman, Lisa Randall, Jürgen Renn, Matthew Ritchie, Silvan S. Schweber, and A. Douglas Stone.
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson’s theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein’s theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. Jimena Canales tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today.
The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
After completing the final version of his general theory of relativity in November 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a book about relativity for a popular audience. His intention was “to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics.” The book remains one of the most lucid explanations of the special and general theories ever written.
This new edition features an authoritative English translation of the text along with an introduction and a reading companion by Hanoch Gutfreund and Jürgen Renn that examines the evolution of Einstein’s thinking and casts his ideas in a broader present-day context.
Published on the hundredth anniversary of general relativity, this handsome edition of Einstein’s famous book places the work in historical and intellectual context while providing invaluable insight into one of the greatest scientific minds of all time.