Jim Simons (1938-2024)
When I learned of Jim Simons’s passing, I was actually at the Simons Foundation headquarters in lower Manhattan, for the annual board meeting of the unparalleled Quanta Magazine, which Simons founded and named. The meeting was interrupted to share the sad news, before it became public … and then it was continued, because that’s obviously what Simons would’ve wanted. An oil portrait of Simons in the conference room took on new meaning.
See here for the Simons Foundation’s announcement, or here for the NYT’s obituary.
Although the Simons Foundation has had multiple significant influences on my life—funding my research, founding the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing in Berkeley that I often visit (including two weeks ago), and much more—I’ve exchanged all of a few sentences with Jim Simons himself. At a previous Simons Foundation meeting, I think he said he’d heard I’d moved from MIT to UT Austin, and asked whether I’d bought a cowboy hat yet. I said I did but I hadn’t yet worn it non-ironically, and he laughed at that. (My wife Dana knew him better, having spent a day at a brainstorming meeting for what became the Simons Institute, his trademark cigar smoke filling the room.)
I am, of course, in awe of what Jim Simons achieved in all three phases of his career — firstly, in mathematical research, where he introduced the Chern-Simons form and other pioneering contributions and led the math department at Stony Brook; secondly, in founding Renaissance and making insane amounts of money (“disproving the Efficient Market Hypothesis,” as some have claimed); and thirdly, in giving his money away to support basic research and the public understanding of it.
I’m glad that Simons, as a lifelong chain smoker, made it all the way to age 86. And I’m glad that the Simons Foundation, which I’m told will continue in perpetuity with no operational changes, will stand as a testament to his vision for the world.
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Comment #1 May 11th, 2024 at 11:43 am
The scale of his success with the Medallion Fund is truly incredible.
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/medallion-fund/
Comment #2 May 12th, 2024 at 1:35 am
Great post, Scott! One minor correction — Simons didn’t introduce Chern-Simons theory; he introduced the Chern-Simons *form*. CS theory is a 3d (or more generally an odd-d) quantum field theory whose the action of the gauge fields is the integral of the CS form, as opposed to the more familiar Maxwell/Yang-Mills action.
CS theory was developed after the CS form; first by Schwarz, Deser, Jackiw, Templeton, and others, and then it was much, much better understood by Witten. It has applications ALL over physics (fractional quantum hall effect, string theory, supergravity, rational CFT to name a few…), mainly because if you want to write down a kinetic term for gauge fields, your choices are only either a Maxwell/YM term or a CS term. In fact I saw an interview by Simons where he said he was originally shocked to learn his CS form had any applications to physics since that had nothing to do with their motivations.
Comment #3 May 12th, 2024 at 5:35 am
Anonymous physicist #2: Thanks! Fixed.
Comment #4 May 12th, 2024 at 7:36 am
Anonymous physicist #2: What was Simons’ motivation?
Comment #5 May 12th, 2024 at 12:41 pm
He also has done a lot of good work by funding research into autism with the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
https://www.sfari.org/
Comment #6 May 13th, 2024 at 12:05 pm
I #4 – the motivation can be found in the abstract of the paper of Chern and Simons. I will not pretend to be an expert so will defer its interpretation to authorities in differential geometry.
https://math.mit.edu/juvitop/pastseminars/notes_2019_Fall/Chern-Simons.pdf
Essentially Simons tried to solve a problem – “derive a purely combinatorial formula for the first Pontrjagin number of a 4-manifold” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontryagin_class). In the failure to do so, an interesting side effect arose (“a tem”) that led to studying it, resulting in the CS form in the paper.
Simons did state he had no idea whatsoever about the physics applications and could not even understand the language of physicists who interacted with him about it initially.
A similar (in spirit) discovery was an invariant from knot theory – Jones polynomials. Discovered by a mathematician, who studied invariants of knots, it took another mathematician (posing a challenge) and a physicist (solving it,) both of them Fields medalists, to figure out a deep meaning as it relates to quantum field theory:
https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/beem/papers/jones_polynomial_witten.pdf
Comment #7 May 13th, 2024 at 12:13 pm
@I #4:
I took a look at their paper to see, and the motivation is pretty explicit and interesting:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1971013
“This work … grew out of an attempt to derivate a purely combinatorial formula for the first Pontrjagin number of a 4-manifold. The hope was that by integrating the characteristic curvature form (wrt some Riemannian metric) simplex by simplex, and replacing the integral over each interior by another on the boundary, one could evaluate these boundary integrals, add up over the triangulation, and have the geometry wash out, leaving the sought after combinatorial formula. This process got stuck by the emergence of a boundary term which did not yield to a simple combinatorial analysis. The boundary term seemed interesting in its own right and it and its generalization are the subject of this paper.”
Comment #8 May 13th, 2024 at 5:48 pm
Anonymous #6
Doug #4
Thank you! That’s very helpful.
Comment #9 May 13th, 2024 at 7:12 pm
Actually, Quanta magazine was founded by Thomas Lin, a former New York Times journalist, according to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanta_Magazine
Comment #10 May 14th, 2024 at 1:24 pm
David C. #9: I know Thomas Lin pretty well. He was the first editor-in-chief, and yes, could also be considered “founder.” Jim Simons gave the magazine both its funding and its name.
Comment #11 May 15th, 2024 at 1:12 pm
Since this is a theoretical computer science oriented blog, I wanted to say a few words about Jim Simons and theoretical computer science. Simons had a high opinion of theoretical computer scientists and gave them the ultimate complement that a pure mathematician can give “they prove theorems”. Apart from the center at Berkeley, the Simons foundation under his leadership supported other substantial TCS related activities. At the individual level, computer scientists were part of the Simons investigator program that supported mid career scientists, there were some TCS centered collaborations, including the first MPS one, Algorithms and geometry, and later, the ongoing collaboration on Algorithmic fairness, the it from qubit collaboration also included a couple of TCS experts and the Math of deep learning collaborations. Which are joint with the NSF and have a substantial CS oriented ML component. There was alao support for NYC based postdocs and more. This great level of support is directly related to Jim’s positive attitude towards the field, with which he was personally familiar with certain aspects.
Comment #12 May 16th, 2024 at 3:33 am
His positive attitude toward TCS was perhaps due to some extent to his friendship and collaboration with people like Elwyn Berlekamp?
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/in-memoriam/files/elwyn-berlekamp.html
Comment #13 May 17th, 2024 at 12:25 pm
RIP
Berlekamp was a very interesting mathematicians.
may he RIP
One of the outmost achievement of a person is leaving behind reputation as a good person among those who knew them. A life lived well.
Comment #14 May 19th, 2024 at 6:44 am
Its a good lesson for people like Ilya and other techno nerds to learn from the life of Simons, where he had stranglehold control on the company he founded, and still(and mostly due to it) contributed immensely to benefit of humanity
Comment #15 May 29th, 2024 at 9:16 am
Not *cigar smoke*, but cigarette smoke, right?