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Jim Simons has died

simonsfoundation.org

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Re: Jim Simons has died

#81

Post by max_ »

1980phipsi wrote: post #37
markgall wrote: post #13

Will 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…

Quanta Magazine is also funded by his foundation.

Even the Numberphile YouTube Channel.

He was very serious about improving maths education and actually did alot.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#82

Post by nybsjytm »

Sometimes people act like guys like Bill Gates or Elon Musk are coming from deep personal scientific knowledge and accomplishment, but they're absolutely nothing compared to Simons. His contributions to geometry in the 60s and 70s, from minimal surfaces to Berger's classification of special holonomy to Chern-Simons theory, were fundamental and are still well-remembered. His name would be known even if he'd never gone into finance or philanthropy.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#83

Post by altruios »

mycologos wrote: post #55
markgall wrote: post #13

Will 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…

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%20egregore....

I don't see it on the Wikipedia page, but the theory that explains the degradation of a companies original mission statement can be summarized as this: "Within an organization(egregore) there exists three classes of individuals... the primary two of which are those that serve in the name of the egregore, and those that serve the egregore directly, the third (a smaller %) being those un-loyal to the current structure and would change the egregore to suit their needs. Of the main two: The dichotomy can be spilt along lines like developers/founders vs marketers/sales, where developers are interested in serving the mission statement and developing a good product, and marketers are interested in growth and survival, at the expense of everything else. So when the developers/founders leave, the vacuum that is created is filled either by those that would change the egregore, or corrupt the mission statement in the name of growth and profit."

This is a simplistic model - with a fair bit of predictive and explanatory power. I have found it useful to describe that shift inside a corporation.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#84

Post by makestuff »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #71
1024core wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC his fund averaged around 30% gains per year, every year, over 30 years. (I'm going from memory here, too lazy to look it up). That is just such an unbelievable performance number.

Aren't there some shenanigans with those numbers around their larger funds not doing as well? It's easy to make a few high margin dollars, hard to make a lot of high margin dollars.

They limited the fund size so employees frequently got distributions from the fund instead of just rolling over their investments. However, the distributions were still in the millions of dollars.

They also got into some tax trouble with uncle sam and had to pay 7b in back taxes (https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-simons-robert-mercer-othe...)

Re: Jim Simons has died

#85

Post by crakenzak »

Schiendelman wrote: post #32
mushufasa wrote: post #16

Last month an amazing biographical podcast came out describing his personal journey to starting rentech, and the factors that make the business so competitive. Certainly worth a listen https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/renaissance-technologies

This is by far my favorite podcast series, I’d recommend the ones on Costco, Amazon, and Nvidia as well.

Their Novo Nordisk one is really great too!

Re: Jim Simons has died

#86

Post by agumonkey »

altruios wrote: post #83
mycologos wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

I find the tension between founders(idealists) / marketers(survivalists) pretty interesting. The Jobs-less apple era is one recent instance I assume.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#88

Post by Smaug123 »

blackhaj7 wrote: post #68

Anyone got a link to the rentec money machine source code? I fancy an early retirement. Jokes aside, really sad to hear this. The guy did a lot of good with the money from what I understand

(If the source were available to you, then it would be available to all the other funds, and so it would instantly stop making money.)

Re: Jim Simons has died

#89

Post by SSLy »

chrispeel wrote: post #20

Archive link for original article: https://archive.ph/zIx9b Simons also funded Quanta magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/about/ His Wikipedia page is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

thank you, the page renders empty for me.

Re: Jim Simons has died

#90

Post by agumonkey »

1024core wrote: post #44
filoleg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His whole RenTech story was fascinating. Effectively an outsider in finance who gathered a bunch of other outsiders (aka big mathematicians), and decided to start a hedge fund that takes zero interest in the actual companies and trades solely on math. Which makes sense, since none of the main people involved in its creation had any corporate or finance experience, but tons of math experience and knowledge. This is ov…

IIRC his fund averaged around 30% gains per year, every year, over 30 years. (I'm going from memory here, too lazy to look it up). That is just such an unbelievable performance number.

I'd still wish to have details on this (I too heard of similar numbers for his fund before), because in my newb eyes .. such returns would mean they could absorb a huge chunk of the planet liquidity.
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