The Hedgehog and the Fox is a late Minimalist sculpture of Richard Serra, installed between Peyton and Fine halls and the football stadium at Princeton University in 2000. It was commissioned for the university by Princeton graduate Peter Joseph in honour of his children some years before his death in 1998. The sculpture and its meaning The sculpture consists of three serpentine sheets of steel standing 94 feet long and 15 feet high, each comprising two identical conical/elliptical sections, inverted relative to each other overall. The steel plates are 2 inches thick and the piece, as often in Serra's work, adapts itself to its environment. It is closely related to other outdoor installations such as the double ribbons of Sidewinder (1999), on the lawn adjacent to the curving drives at Leonard Riggio’s home in Bridgehampton, New York, and the single ribbon following the contour line of “Contour 290” (Glenstone, 2004). An earlier example is the larger but structurally similar Snake (1996) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Double Torqued Ellipse of 1997. However, although the ribbon sculptures relate to Serra's Torqued Ellipse series of this period, their openness also contrasts with the small private spaces carved out of the large public sites where the sculptures of that series are installed. The title of The Hedgehog and the Fox refers to an essay of that name by Isaiah Berlin, where he quotes a line from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one great thing." Serra has explained that "It points to how scholars either become free thinkers and invent or become subjugated to the dictates of history. This is the classical problem posed to every student." Harold Foster, a professor in Princeton's art and archaeology department, has further commented upon it that "There are those who follow one principle in all they do — the hedgehogs — and those who look to different approaches at the same time — the foxes. The suggestion is that students might negotiate a balance between these two ways." Viewers are therefore invited to engage with the sculpture by walking through its twisting structure and so enact that intellectual journey. Serra further emphasised his thinking in the interview he gave before delivering a lecture on his work at Princeton as Belknap Visitor in the Humanities in 2001. "The experience of the subject is the piece itself. Without the