One of Jim Simons’ favorite places was the front row of the Simons Foundation’s Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium. Sitting in his customary seat, he would listen as some of the world’s leading thinkers shared the latest advances in our understanding of the universe. Even when he would occasionally doze off during a talk, he would always be ready at the end with a perceptive question.
More than 50 leading mathematicians who have received funding support from the Simons Foundation have been selected to present at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia. The ICM takes place every four years, bringing together top mathematicians from around the world for the largest conference on mathematics.
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce that mathematical physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf has rejoined its board of trustees. Dijkgraaf was a board member from 2021 to 2022 before departing the position to serve as the minister of education, culture and science for the Netherlands.
On a moonless night, deep in the eastern Himalayan jungle, the stillness is pierced by the thunderous flapping of thousands of moth wings. The nocturnal insects fight for space on a lamplit tarp as researchers armed with digital cameras snap photos.
Story for the Simons Foundation's 2024 annual report.
The “thing about basic science is, you don’t know really where it’s going to go, but you can hope that it’s going to go far,” Jim Simons said during his speech at a 2016 graduation ceremony at York University in Toronto.
Story for the Simons Foundation's 2024 annual report.
The Telly Awards has named the foundation’s short film on the life and impact of Jim Simons as a People’s Telly Gold Winner in the general non-broadcast category and a silver winner in the general-biography category. The film, Jim Simons: Life and Philanthropy, chronicles Simons’ contributions and careers as a world-renowned mathematician, a trailblazing investor and a generous philanthropist.
In its first year of publication, The Transmitter has taken home four Jesse H. Neal Awards from SIIA Media, which recognize the best of business journalism and content creation.
In quantum physics, there’s no such thing as truly empty space. Even the barest of voids has quantum fluctuations, such as particles continually being created and quickly annihilated in empty space. In a new paper in Nature, a team of quantum physicists, including Flatiron Institute research scientist Nicolas Regnault, demonstrates a remarkable setup that can alter a material’s properties using vacuum field fluctuations. By tuning the interaction strength between vacuum fields and gases made up of electrons confined to two dimensions of movement, the team successfully altered the bulk behavior of the electrons using the vacuum field fluctuations.
“I’m fascinated with beginnings,” Simons Foundation co-founder Jim Simons says in Eternal Sky, a documentary now available for streaming. The film, directed by Debra Kellner, chronicles the lead-up to the construction of the Simons Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. That project, designed and built by an international collaboration funded and brought together by Simons, aims to answer an enduring question: How did our universe come to be?
Fundamental research on the mathematics of waves led to the development of the ‘landscape function,’ which has quickly revolutionized the engineering of power-efficient LED lightbulbs.