Foundation’s Film About Jim Simons Named People’s Gold Winner at Telly Awards

Simons Foundation, May 2025

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.

Quantum Physicists Tune Material’s Property Using Energy of ‘Empty’ Space

Simons Foundation, May 2025

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.

Eternal Sky Film About Jim Simons and the Simons Observatory Now Streaming

Simons Foundation, May 2025

“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?

Watch: Jim Simons’ Life, Legacy and 5 Guiding Principles

Simons Foundation, January 2025

Simons Foundation co-founder Jim Simons — an award-winning mathematician and widely regarded as the father of modern quantitative investing — led an extraordinary life, championing new ideas and ways of thinking as a mathematician, an investor and a philanthropist. On May 10, 2024, Simons died at the age of 86, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy.