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.
It is with great sadness that the Simons Foundation announces the death of its co-founder and chair emeritus, James Harris Simons, on May 10, 2024, at the age of 86, in New York City.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected Marilyn H. Simons, board chair of the Simons Foundation, to its 2024 class of new members.
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce that Samir Patel has joined Quanta Magazine as editor-in-chief. In the role, Patel will oversee the editorially independent publication’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of math and science.
The Association for Computing Machinery has named Avi Wigderson the winner of the 2023 A.M. Turing Award for his “foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.”