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Jim Simons has died
241–250 of 338 posts
Re: Jim Simons has died
#242Will 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…
He was worth an ungodly amount of money. His foundation or whatever vehicle he chose will surely be around for a long time.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Simons has been out of day-to-day management for quite some time. He was succeeded by co-CEOs who were then themselves succeeded, IIRC. (These are my recollections from reading The Man Who Solved the Market). Apparently his management style was always pretty hands off and they operated multiple successful quant strategies that were led by others. Their Medallion fund returned 22% after (huge) fees in 2022 according t…
It would imply good processes for keeping out those that would run it to the ground in the name of (short term) profits... That makes me hopeful...
But every succession is a risk. Every merger is a risk... ask Boeing.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#244Re: Jim Simons has died
#245Medallion fund
Re: Jim Simons has died
#246This is really sad. Simons definitely had some views I don't agree with, but he was one of the good ones overall. Specifically, I hope the Simons Foundation continues to fund Math for America. My wife participated in this program, and it helped her become an excellent educator while also _significantly_ helping her financially.
what views of his do you disagree with?
Re: Jim Simons has died
#247Need a tracker for medallion fund
Re: Jim Simons has died
#248I 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.
Don't think about the money. Money flows in one direction, but corporate decisions, organization of resources, manufacturing activity -- real physical flows, energy flows, mass flows -- move opposite. What "finance" really is is improving allocation of those real resources, and then skimming a little bit off of the improvement. Fundamentally, money is a signal for the expenditure of energy. The flow of money, the signal, can be analyzed and applied optimally to improve the expenditure of energy.
If the world's production capacity is a giant muscle, finance is like the brain. Spending 20 watts of brainpower to move a 100 watt muscle in the right way can be hugely effective, far more effective than a 1000 watt muscle with 5 watts of brain.
This is really what finance does. They improve the movement of the muscle.
Re: Jim Simons has died
#249Did he share some book recommendations?
Re: Jim Simons has died
#250Will 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…
That money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s.
How difficult is to run a glorified BBS over HTTP/HTML like that?
Like seriously?
It's not as difficult as the stuff being published there.