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.
What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery? Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean’s layers mix? A collaboration of researchers from universities, science philanthropies and national laboratories has reached an important milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and exploit transferable knowledge between seemingly disparate fields to drive scientific discovery.
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce that mathematician Jill Pipher has joined its board of trustees. Pipher is the Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University, where she served as vice president for research from 2017 to 2024. She directed the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics from its founding in 2010 to 2016. Pipher previously served on the scientific advisory board for the Simons Foundation’s Mathematics & Physical Sciences division. From 2019 to 2021, she served as president of the American Mathematical Society.
Physicist Riccardo Rossi has received the 2024 Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award in Many-Body Physics for his groundbreaking research in computational quantum field theory.
The Rockefeller Institute of Government has announced the six scientists who will make up the inaugural cohort of the New York State Science Policy Fellowship. The program, funded by the Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, gives fellows the opportunity to lend their technical and scientific expertise to state policymakers while gaining hands-on experience in state government.
The standard model of the universe relies on just six numbers. Using a new approach powered by artificial intelligence, researchers at the Flatiron Institute and their colleagues extracted information hidden in the distribution of galaxies to estimate the values of five of these so-called cosmological parameters with incredible precision.
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce that investor and business leader Bill Ford and organizational advisor and investment professional Andrew Golden have joined its board of trustees.
Thousands of people from around the world gathered under the Texas sky to witness one of the universe’s most spectacular sights: a total solar eclipse, the last in the contiguous United States for 20 years. Attendees listened to live music, chatted with scientists, sipped eclipse-themed beers and anxiously eyed the clouds overhead.
The hunt is on. From a vantage point high in the Chilean Andes, cosmologists with the Simons Observatory have begun searching for evidence of what happened in the minuscule fraction of a second that followed the Big Bang.
Jim Simons led a life driven by curiosity. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, on April 25, 1938, he showed an early affinity for mathematics. He’d pass the time by doubling numbers repeatedly and pondering Zeno’s paradox.