[markgall]

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 conferences, there is the SCGP at Stony Brook, the Simons Center in Manhattan, whatever MSRI is called now, AMS-Simons travel grants, tons of money for the arXiv, the Magma license deal... and that's just the stuff that I've benefited from personally. I know there's more, Simons Collaboration grants and probably other things I've never heard of. He was very good to us all.

We've always joked that Phds in geometry-adjacent fields have to have one of the highest average incomes of any degree, probably at least $1 million a year. Simons making $3 billion, the rest of us making 90k apiece.

[mycologos]

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.

[qq66]

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.

[altruios]

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.

[eru]

> Hopefully the Simons empire has enough people who will keep executing his vision and stave off bureaucratic rot.

I think that fear is why the Gates foundation (or was it the one by Buffett or both?) have to spend down their endowment within a few years of the founder's death and then close shop.

[bmitc]

For what it's worth, the foundation was actually kickstarted by his wife.

[wslh]

It is not about enough people, it is about THE PERSON. Every people is different and there are people who are more different and outliers.

[hinkley]

I wonder if he left any of the rest of his money to the foundation, or if it all stays with his family.

[1980phipsi]

Quanta Magazine is also funded by his foundation.

[max_]

Even the Numberphile YouTube Channel.

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

[markgall]

Good point! Far and away the best popularization of recent results, at least in the eyes of a mathematician.

[nextos]

And lots of great work in quantitative biology, which is hard to get funded elsewhere.

[frinxor]

came here to mention this as well! fantastic ezine that i click everytime i see it linked here.

[squirrel6]

Not to mention Math for America, which is one of the best funded organizations of its kind…

[markgall]

Another important one! I think they pump a lot of money into the MoMath as well. It's just hard to come up with every way the math world depends on Simons money.

[hx2a]

I believe Jim Simons is also one of the founders behind the National Museum of Mathematics in NYC.

https://momath.org/

[hinkley]

His wife also helps run the foundation doesn’t she? Looks like she’s ~73 so hopefully has a few years left.

[hinkley]

Geeze, phrasing. I meant "a few years of actively supporting the foundation", not "let's start a death clock."

[pyrrhotech]

73 is less than a decade into retirement age; hopefully she has much more than a few! Looks like 14.5 years life expectancy

[infinet]

Been a mathematician, he also funds physics. See Simons Observatory that studies Cosmic Microwave Background.

[abhgh]

I wasn't aware of this till a friend told me: the Simons foundation partly also funds the Perimeter institute [1].

[1] https://perimeterinstitute.ca/news/new-simons-foundation-sup...

[jasondigitized]

He was worth an ungodly amount of money. His foundation or whatever vehicle he chose will surely be around for a long time.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

This is what Elon musk could have been. Instead of that he became a 13 yr old guy.

[spr-alex]

this was posted down into the comments already but geometry has nothing to do with https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/renaissance-irs-...

the simons foundation will have influence on machine learning and medicine for many decades to come though and will hopefully be a force of positivity in these fields

[lupire]

Simons was a geometer.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1970273?origin=crossref

[ev7]

And the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at Berkeley!

[next_xibalba]

> found these conferences a bit ridiculous

Was it the content/aims of the conferences, or just that they were so ostentatiously luxurious?

[xiaodai]

Magma. Only in the us. Sydney where it’s developed have to pay for it

[PaulHoule]

That money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s.

[infecto]

> That money for the arXiv was a decade late. arXiv barely survived the 2000s.

I find this kind of comment quite distasteful on someones death. Was he actively trying to destroy arXiv?

[soperj]

That's a strange sentiment, it's not like he had to donate at all?

[77pt77]

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.

[renewiltord]

Ah, good looking out. It was on my list for this year https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html but if it's useless I'll skip it. More for GiveWell it is.