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James Simons, a legend of mathematics and the "King of Quantification", passed away at the age of 86.
In our traditional impression, mathematicians are mostly rigorous and conservative, concentrating on their own mathematical research, and rarely stepping into fields other than mathematics. Simons, on the other hand, was an offbeat, having made a name for himself as a mathematician on Wall Street.
Simons is best known for his research in the field of pattern recognition, and in addition, he creatively applied the mathematical models of his research to the investment world, becoming "the greatest investor on Wall Street" and even considered "the most successful hedge fund manager of all time".
As for the money earned, Simons did not splurge on it, but turned to a more meaningful direction - the establishment of a charitable foundation. 1994 year. The Simons Foundation, founded by the Simons couple, was born.
The money earned from Wall Street ended up in science and math. The Simons Foundation is also one of the world's best-known science foundations.
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一代传奇James Simons落幕。
Simons was not only a great mathematician, but also founded a very successful foundation, the Simons Foundation, and became an investor in scientists around the world.
Since its inception in 1994, the Simons Foundation has invested heavily in scientific and mathematical research.
Simons, the founder of the Simons Foundation, is not using charity to "golden" himself, he himself has a rich academic background.
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From a mathematician to an investor
James Simons was born into an American family on April 25, 1938, and grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Simons showed exceptional talent at an early age, attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after graduating from high school. In 1958, Simons received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then chose to further his studies and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley in 1961 under the supervision of geometrician Bertram Kostant, at the age of 23.
Simons和他的夫人Marilyn
In the field of mathematics, Simons' research focuses on the geometry and topology of manifolds, and he has contributed to the development of string theory by co-developing the Chern-Simons form with Chern and providing a theoretical framework for combining geometry and topology with quantum field theory.
In addition to purely theoretical mathematics, Simons also paid great attention to the practical value of mathematics, and he applied mathematics to the field of code cracking. During the Vietnam War, he worked as a codebreaker at the National Security Agency from 1964 to 1968 while also doing research at the Institute for Defense Analysis. But because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, he quit the job. After that, Simons was invited to teach mathematics at MIT and Harvard, and was eventually appointed chair of the Department of Mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (aka Stony Brook University).
It can be said that Simons has been very successful as a mathematician, and he is known to the outside world in large part because of his other identity, the "Quant King" of Wall Street.
In 1978, Simons founded a hedge fund company called Monemetrics. It was then that he realized that the pattern recognition he was working on could be applied to financial market trading, so he developed a quantitative model system.
In 1982, Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, where he hired a number of mathematicians, statisticians, and physicists. Through quantitative analysis and algorithmic investment strategies, Simons became the "Wolf of Wall Street" and he himself was dubbed the "King of Quants".
As of 2022, Renaissance Technologies has estimated assets of $55 billion. In the same year, Simons ranked 48th on the Forbes list of American billionaires with a net worth of $29 billion.
While Wall Street was in the ascendant, Simons thought of giving back the money he earned to his math and science careers. Simons is one of the major donors to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which funded the renovation of the university's mathematics department building, which was named after them in 2016 in honor of his contributions. In addition, Simons also donated to the establishment of the Simmons Social Brain Center.
In the same year of 2006, the Simons also donated $25 million to Stony Brook University through the Stony Brook Foundation, the largest donation to a SUNY school at the time.
The Simons' philanthropic efforts are best known for the Simmons Foundation, which they co-founded.
The Foundation aims to support research related to mathematics as well as basic sciences by providing grants to individual researchers and their projects. To date, the Simons have donated more than $2.7 billion to the foundation.
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Funded countless top scientists, including Chern
Simmons worked closely with Chern, and in his later years, he directly funded Chern's scientific research.
In fact, Simmons' relationship with Chern goes back decades. In 1974, they jointly published a paper proposing the chern-Simons form, which describes the quantum field theory of three-dimensional topology, which is widely used in the field of physics, and it is this theorem that won Simmons the 1976 Oswald Veblen Prize, the largest award in geometry and topology, which indirectly led to the birth of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Simmons and his friends Chern and Yang Zhenning (first from the right, Yang Zhenning, second from the right, Simmons from the right, Marilyn from the fourth)
Simmons was also very grateful to Chern and donated to build two buildings named after Chern.
The Chen-Simmons (Simmons) Building at Tsinghua University, image source: mathcubic.org
In 2005, Simmons completed the building at Tsinghua University with a donation in honor of Chern, and the building is also named after them, the "Chen-Simmons Building".
The Chern Building at the University of California, Berkeley, was also built with a donation from Simmons and expanded in 2006. Interestingly, the expansion also included a new $10.5 million concert hall, named after Simmons Auditorium.
Chern often joked before his death, hoping that he would live a few more years so that he could ask Simmons for more money.
The legend of genius is never just a legend, and the "Simmons Foundation" founded by Simmons is really supporting scholars at the forefront of science, and their research results will continue to advance the development of science in the world, which makes everyone excited and excited.
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How does the Simmons Foundation support cutting-edge science?
The Simmons Foundation, located in New York, USA, has been around for 30 years since its inception in 1994.
Since its inception, the Simons Foundation has been run by Simons' wife, Marilyn Simons, who in 2021 stepped down from her position to hand over the job to astrophysicist David Spergel. Currently, the Foundation has more than 500 employees, half of whom are scientists.
David Spergel
The Simons Foundation grants funding at four levels: Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Autism and Neuroscience, and Science, Society and Culture.
Among them, some of the more well-known programs are as follows:
Simmons Foundation Autism Research Program (SFARI): This program works to improve the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of autism spectrum disorder by funding high-quality, innovative research;
Simmons Global Brain Collaboration (SCGB): a program dedicated to supporting systems and computational neuroscience to expand human understanding of the internal state of the brain;
Simmons Plasticity and Aging Brain Collaboration (SCPAB): This project aims to discover the resilience and functional maintenance mechanisms of the non-diseased aging brain.
One of the hallmarks of the Simons Foundation is its innovative partnership model. In 2012, the foundation launched a new funding model called Simons Collaborations. The model brings together funded researchers, sometimes from different disciplines, to work together on an important scientific question.
Take the Simons Marine Ecosystem Computational Biogeochemical Modeling Collaboration (CBIOMES), which brings together multidisciplinary research groups from oceanography, statistics, data science, ecology, biogeochemistry, and remote sensing. Scholars from multiple fields and disciplines have come together to develop and apply quantitative models of the structure and function of marine microbial communities.
In addition to this, the Simons Foundation seems to have focused on the field of computational science in recent years. In 2016, the foundation established the Flatiron Institute, an in-house multidisciplinary research institute focused on computational science. Within the Flatiron Institute, there are six computational science centers: the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), the Center for Computational Biology (CCB), the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ), the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM), the Center for Computational Neuroscience (CCN), and the Center for Scientific Computing (SCC).
In addition, the Simons Foundation has set up a special Independence Awards, which allow fellows to receive support for a period of five years. The award is divided into two parts, the first is the Postdoctoral Award, which lasts up to two years and provides an annual salary of $85,000 and a $10,000 annual resource and career development stipend, among others, and the Faculty Research Award, which lasts for more than three years and awards up to $600,000 in total when a fellow is offered an approved tenure-track position.
To date, the Simons Foundation has become one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the United States. In 2022, its assets exceeded $5 billion, and although Simons has since been embroiled in controversy due to tax turmoil, we expect the Simons Foundation to fund more scientific research in the future.
Resources
1.2022 Genomics of ASD: Pathways to Genetic Therapies awardees announced. Simons Foundation.
2.Who Is Jim Simons?. investopedia.
3.Jim Simons.wikipedia.
4.Simons Foundation.wikipedia.
5.Simons Foundation官网