I might be naive but it seems unfortunate that so many bright minds end up using their talents to catch trillions of pennies in the financial markets.
What you said might be true, but he's like THE outlier of this trope though.
Jim Simons has died
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Re: Jim Simons has died
#112Heads up: website breaks on Fennec with uBlock Origin turned on (and all filters enabled). Website unbreaks when uBlock Origin is turned off. Looks like a new way to punish uBlock.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#113Sorry to hear this. RIP.
“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”
- Jim Simons
Re: Jim Simons has died
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully 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.
sadly, 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%20egreg…
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Re: Jim Simons has died
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully 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.
The thing is that he genuinely loved math. I don't think there's really anyone in his orbit who loves math as much. His family is his family and his colleagues love money. We'll see in the coming months and years whether he was able to create a structure that continues his legacy but usually the answer to that question is no.
His foundation also donates a lot to neuroscience research, particularly for Autism. I think there was a family reason for that, so probably at least some of his scientific philanthropy will continue for awhile. But yeah it's extremely hard to create a structure that would perpetuate without the remaining people at the top truly buying into and understanding the mission.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#116[deleted]
Re: Jim Simons has died
#117[dead]
Re: Jim Simons has died
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the machine"? What is "the machine", the economy?
I meant the financial-industrial complex that dictates our economy.
Other principles that he famously stood for against the machine was opposing the Vietnam war when he was a cryptographer for the US government machine.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#119Re: Jim Simons has died
#120Will 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 conference…
Been a mathematician, he also funds physics. See Simons Observatory that studies Cosmic Microwave Background.