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Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken
by markgall 2y ago
Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.)
Besides the conferences, there is the SCGP at Stony Brook, the Simons Center in Manhattan, whatever MSRI is called now, AMS-Simons travel grants, tons of money for the arXiv, the Magma license deal... and that's just the stuff that I've benefited from personally. I know there's more, Simons Collaboration grants and probably other things I've never heard of. He was very good to us all.
We've always joked that Phds in geometry-adjacent fields have to have one of the highest average incomes of any degree, probably at least $1 million a year. Simons making $3 billion, the rest of us making 90k apiece.
- 1980phipsi 2y agoQuanta Magazine is also funded by his foundation.
- max_ 2y agoEven the Numberphile YouTube Channel. He was very serious about improving maths education and actually did alot.
- 7thaccount 2y agoMan. That Numberphile episode on Fermat's Last Theorem with Simon Singh had me on the edge of my seat like I was as a child when Darth Maul pulled out that double-bladed lightsaber during Phantom Menace. I'm not a math major either.
- hnbear 2y agoI thought Numberphile is sponsored by Jane St. Another math focused quant firm.
- max_ 2y agoThey have many sponsors. Jim Discovered their channel, liked it and invited them to his New York Apartment for an interview. [1] From that time forward, all Numberphile videos have "Simons Foundation" at the end listed as a sponsor. [1]: Here is the video https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0?si=SVnDx77dQNepMRJW https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0?si=SVnDx77dQNepMRJW
- rajnathani 2y agoQuanta is by the Simons Foundation, whereas the Numberphile YouTube channel is simply sponsored by them.
- markgall 2y agoGood point! Far and away the best popularization of recent results, at least in the eyes of a mathematician.
- nextos 2y agoAnd lots of great work in quantitative biology, which is hard to get funded elsewhere.
- frinxor 2y agocame here to mention this as well! fantastic ezine that i click everytime i see it linked here.
- jasondigitized 2y agoHe was worth an ungodly amount of money. His foundation or whatever vehicle he chose will surely be around for a long time.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoThis is what Elon musk could have been. Instead of that he became a 13 yr old guy.
- mciancia 2y agoRight, because spacex, starlink, tesla and neuralink don't exist. All he does is shitposting
- PaulHoule 2y agoThat money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s.
- renewiltord 2y agoAh, good looking out. It was on my list for this year https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html but if it's useless I'll skip it. More for GiveWell it is.
- lupire 2y agoWhy would you change your donation plans based on an unsubstantiated snarky comment about an event 15 years ago?
- renewiltord 2y agoI have a spreadsheet. I take action at the end of the year depending on whether I'm itemizing or not (which I'll know at the end). I'm not going to do too much research. I'll add to it if I have a positive experience. If something annoying barely approaches the space of a thing I blacklist. I have some retention of some things on it but others I might fail to blacklist. In this case, I remembered. I have a good base-case: GiveWell. So I'm content to dump everyone else on the slightest suspicion. I don't really care that much.
- infecto 2y ago> That money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s. I find this kind of comment quite distasteful on someones death. Was he actively trying to destroy arXiv?
- PaulHoule 2y agoI'm not blaming Simons, I am blaming the people I worked for when I worked at arXiv who, again, took a decade to start looking for sustainable funding.
- mycologos 2y agoHopefully the Simons empire has enough people who will keep executing his vision and stave off bureaucratic rot. Making money is one thing, but circulating so much of it back through math and science is a great legacy.
- hinkley 2y agoI wonder if he left any of the rest of his money to the foundation, or if it all stays with his family.
- paulpauper 2y agohttps://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=288 https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=288 giving it away
- altruios 2y agosadly, the trend for these sorts of things is to sour after the original founder leaves... There is an esoteric concept that has some dynamics that explain this phenomenon somewhat. Not to get to into the weeds (the origins of this concept are esoteric religious ideas - I mean this secularly, as it relates to business entities) but the concept is an 'egregore' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#:~:text=An%20egregore%20(also%20spelled%20egregor,a%20distinct%20group%20of%20individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#:~:text=An%20egregore.... I don't see it on the Wikipedia page, but the theory that explains the degradation of a companies original mission statement can be summarized as this: "Within an organization(egregore) there exists three classes of individuals... the primary two of which are those that serve in the name of the egregore, and those that serve the egregore directly, the third (a smaller %) being those un-loyal to the current structure and would change the egregore to suit their needs. Of the main two: The dichotomy can be spilt along lines like developers/founders vs marketers/sales, where developers are interested in serving the mission statement and developing a good product, and marketers are interested in growth and survival, at the expense of everything else. So when the developers/founders leave, the vacuum that is created is filled either by those that would change the egregore, or corrupt the mission statement in the name of growth and profit." This is a simplistic model - with a fair bit of predictive and explanatory power. I have found it useful to describe that shift inside a corporation.
- squirrel6 2y agoNot to mention Math for America, which is one of the best funded organizations of its kind…
- markgall 2y agoAnother important one! I think they pump a lot of money into the MoMath as well. It's just hard to come up with every way the math world depends on Simons money.
- hinkley 2y agoHis wife also helps run the foundation doesn’t she? Looks like she’s ~73 so hopefully has a few years left.
- hinkley 2y agoGeeze, phrasing. I meant "a few years of actively supporting the foundation", not "let's start a death clock."
- pyrrhotech 2y ago73 is less than a decade into retirement age; hopefully she has much more than a few! Looks like 14.5 years life expectancy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eru 2y ago> Looks like 14.5 years life expectancy And I assume that's for normal people of her age and gender? She's probably far from normal.
- infinet 2y agoBeen a mathematician, he also funds physics. See Simons Observatory that studies Cosmic Microwave Background.
- abhgh 2y agoI wasn't aware of this till a friend told me: the Simons foundation partly also funds the Perimeter institute [1]. [1] https://perimeterinstitute.ca/news/new-simons-foundation-support-dedicated-encouraging-early-career-women-physics https://perimeterinstitute.ca/news/new-simons-foundation-sup...
- hx2a 2y agoI believe Jim Simons is also one of the founders behind the National Museum of Mathematics in NYC. https://momath.org/ https://momath.org/
- next_xibalba 2y ago> found these conferences a bit ridiculous Was it the content/aims of the conferences, or just that they were so ostentatiously luxurious?
- spr-alex 2y agothis was posted down into the comments already but geometry has nothing to do with https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/renaissance-irs-robert-mercer-james-simons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/renaissance-irs-... the simons foundation will have influence on machine learning and medicine for many decades to come though and will hopefully be a force of positivity in these fields
- lupire 2y agoSimons was a geometer. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1970273?origin=crossref https://www.jstor.org/stable/1970273?origin=crossref
- ev7 2y agoAnd the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley!
- xiaodai 2y agoMagma. Only in the us. Sydney where it’s developed have to pay for it