Five Faculty Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

By James Devitt

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected five New York University faculty members as fellows: political scientist Nathaniel Beck; mathematics professor Jeff Cheeger; philosophy professor Kit Fine; neural scientist Joseph LeDoux; and Charles Newman, director of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The five are among 175 new Fellows and 20 new foreign honorary members elected by AAAS. Among the newly elected are former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as well as chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.

Beck, a professor in NYU’s Department of Politics, is an expert in political methodology, serving as editor of the journal Political Analysis and twice winning the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology.

Cheeger, a faculty member in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, specializes in differential geometry and its connections to topology and analysis. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Mathematical Society.

Fine, NYU’s Silver Professor of Philosophy, specializes in metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. He has authored Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects (Blackwell, 1985) and co-authored Worlds, Times, and Selves (Duckworth, 1977).

LeDoux, a faculty member in NYU’s Department of Neural Science, has worked on the emotion and memory in the brain for more than 20 years. His published works include The Emotional Brain (Simon and Schuster, 1998) and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (Viking, 2002).

Newman, with specialties in probability theory and statistical physics, has been director of the Courant Institute since 2002. Newman has been a Sloan fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

The Academy will welcome this year’s elected fellows at its annual induction ceremony on Oct. 7, at its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and others, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th.