The Institute for Advanced Study was home to Einstein in decline, the place where the father of relativity worked for 2 fruitless years on field theory and wrote naive political tracts. It was where Kurt Goedel starved himself in paraniod delusion and where J. Robert Oppenheimer rode out his political persecution with boozy evenings in the Director's mansion. Founded in 1933 by a philanthropic department-store magnate, the Institute has played host to 14 Nobel Prize winners and to most of the great physicists and mathematicians of the 20th century. This is the history of this Institute.