The Billionaire Mathematician 96
An anonymous reader writes Dr. James Simons received his doctorate at the age of 23. He was breaking codes for the NSA at 26, and was put in charge of Stony Brook University's math department at 30. He received the Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1976. Today, he's a multi-billionaire, using his fortune to set up educational foundations for math and science. "His passion, however, is basic research — the risky, freewheeling type. He recently financed new telescopes in the Chilean Andes that will look for faint ripples of light from the Big Bang, the theorized birth of the universe. The afternoon of the interview, he planned to speak to Stanford physicists eager to detect the axion, a ghostly particle thought to permeate the cosmos but long stuck in theoretical limbo. Their endeavor 'could be very exciting,' he said, his mood palpable, like that of a kid in a candy store." Dr. Simons is quick to say this his persistence, more than his intelligence, is key to his success: "I wasn't the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn't have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach."
National Museum of Mathematics (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA [nytimes.com]
Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath [momath.org], an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors.
Amazing, 250k visitors to a math museum? Who knew?
Simons Foundation - MoMath [simonsfoundation.org]
grigori perelman and this guy walk into a bar (Score:5, Interesting)
james says "Hi Grigori, i have a billion dollars"
grigori says. "i am not interested in money"
james says "I graduated top honors, went to many three letter acronyms, and started a mega-company"
grigori says "i am not interested in fame"
james says "i am kind of a big deal. i have been featured in books and now on slashdot"
grigori says "i wouldnt want to be like an animal in a zoo, on display"
james says "i have given millions to charities, all kinds of charities, to encourage STEM"..
grigori says "You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms,"
Being a quant in the early years. (Score:5, Interesting)
His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.
The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.
Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.
Except that they put time limits on (Score:3, Interesting)
I.Q. tests, aptitude tests, and just about all other tests. Makes you wonder if the entire examination dichotomy is wrong.
Re:Reminds me of The Wonderful Burt Wonderstone (Score:2, Interesting)
Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards.
As a med student with an engineering degree, please accept my fervent assurances that the modern human brain is wired backwards.
Imagine the worst layer-violating spaghetti code running on a bunch of servers in a dusty wiring closet with the most fucked up rat's nest interconnect patch panel from your most fevered dreams. Then imagine someone said, "Brilliant! Let's build billions of copies exactly like this! We'll rule the world with our superior design!"
Sometimes it amuses me how offensive my brain finds its own system to be. It's hard to countenance as an engineer...
Maybe Dr Simons could buy rights to math texts (Score:5, Interesting)