S. Donald Sussman Fellowship Fireside Chat with Dr. James Simons — Chat 3 (Philanthropy)

I want to particularly acknowledge donors to the Sussman Fellowship, friends and family of our award recipient, Dr. Simons, alumni, faculty, and students from around MIT that are joining us today. Let me also thank the MIT Sloan Finance Group for organizing the event series. And let me just state at the start that it's a real pleasure to be here for this third and final installment of the Fellowship Award Series. I certainly wish that I could have attended the first two, but I know from talking to many of you that they were really quite fantastic talks, and I'm sure we'll have a wonderful fireside chat this afternoon. Let me start with a little bit of background about the S. Donald Sussman Fellowship.

For those of you who might not have been able to join for the previous events in this series, the fellowship was established in honor of Donald Sussman's 30-year career in alternative investments and fund management that focuses on both quantitative and fundamental strategies. Donald Sussman is the founder of FT Asset Management, Paloma Partners, and New China Capital Management, LLC. The Sussman Fellowship is awarded to an individual or group who best exemplifies Donald Sussman's impressive career as a successful investor in quantitative investment strategies and models. This academic year, the selection committee awarded MIT alumnus Dr. James Simons as the recipient of this fellowship. impressive career as a successful investor in quantitative investment strategies and models.

I think that works, Jim. Let me say a few words of background about Jim Simons. Jim has had an extraordinary career as a mathematician, investor, and philanthropist. He's a founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, a highly quantitative investment firm, chairman of the Simons Foundation, an organization dedicated to advancing the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences, and also the creator of the Flatiron Institute. He's founder and chairman of Math for America, a nonprofit organization with a mission to significantly improve math education in our nation's public schools, and perhaps most importantly for us, he's a Class of 1958 alumnus, having earned his degree out of Course 18.

And Jim's been a leader in the MIT community for many decades, also serving as a lifetime emeritus member of the Corporation. And Jim and his wife, Marilyn, who's joined us this afternoon as well, have really been an incredibly important partner with us in our pursuit of mathematics at MIT and in the world. I would point out that their generosity enabled the Institute to restore, for the first time in, I think, 100 years, the Building 2 on the MIT campus, the renovation of Building 2, which is now named the Simons Building and is the home for the Department of Mathematics. And if you haven't been there since the renovation, I encourage you to do it because it's really quite beautiful. Since 1999, the Department of Mathematics presents the Simons Lecture Series each spring to celebrate the most exciting mathematical work by the best mathematicians of our time.

The Simons Foundation established the Simons Center for the Social Brain to create and translate knowledge into better diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders. And Jim and Marilyn are also very passionate about supporting math and science teaching at the middle school and high school levels, and the Simons Foundation established Math for America, an organization that identifies and supports outstanding math and science teachers in the New York City public schools through renewable four-year fellowships. I could continue on for many pages with all the wonderful things they've done both here at MIT and in the world in philanthropy. We've been honored to have Jim on campus with us over the past few weeks to discuss his expansive career in math and finance.

Tonight we conclude the Math, Money, and Making a Difference series with a conversation focused on Jim's experience and dedication as a philanthropist. And Mike Sipser, the Donner Professor of Mathematics and the Dean of the School of Science, will moderate this fireside chat. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that tomorrow is an important day in philanthropy, Pi Day. It's also when we announce admissions. But Pi Day is a day that will mark MIT's third annual 24-hour challenge. It's a day when our community comes together to provide critical funding for the Institute. So we're incredibly fortunate to have Jim with us today, who's going to talk to us about his career as a philanthropist and what inspires his dedication and support of so many initiatives that are initiatives to make a better world.

So without further ado, let me invite Jim and Mike to the stage, and let's please welcome them.

Oh. Thank you, Marty. So I also want to welcome you all to this third S. Donald Sussman Fellowship Fireside Chat with Jim Simons. It's entitled "Making a Difference" and will be about Jim's philanthropy. The first talk was about math, and the second talk was about money. Those talks were moderated by Tom Mrowka, a mathematician, and Andrew Lo, an expert in finance. I am not a philanthropist, nor am I an expert in philanthropy. But it is fitting, I think, that I conduct this interview because I was head of mathematics, as Marty said, for 10 years. And the math department was transformed through Jim's generosity, especially through the marvelous renovation of the Simons Building, as we now call it, endowed chairs, fellowships, and in many other ways, some of them ongoing through the Simons Foundation's support.

And it's also especially meaningful for me to be personally here with you, Jim. I've known you since I was a graduate student in the 1970s. And maybe, actually, that's longer than anybody else in the room.

Anybody else in the room has known you as I've known anyone else in the room? For example, my grandson is here. Who? My grandson is here. I've known him for a long time.

I think I've known you longer than that.

Oh, you could have been. You could have. Well, I'll explain. Mike was the boyfriend of my ex-wife. He was. He was the boyfriend of my ex-wife, and that's how I met him. This is true. Life is strange. Yeah. All right, you can stop laughing. No, it's not that.

I mean, should I say anything more about that? No, that's enough. That's definitely enough. Well, I mean, that is true. I had nothing to do with the problem between Jim and Barbara Simons, just to be clear on that. But Jim was always very gracious to me. I got to know Jim and his children at that time. And so anyway, actually, I remember asking you about, because you were already in the process of amassing your wealth at the very beginning. You were a lot wealthier than I had any vision to be, a lot less wealthy than you are now, of course. And I remember I asked you, what are you going to do with all your money? I don't know if you remember the conversation. I don't. But I do. And you said you didn't know.

But you said you'd figure it out. And I did. And you did. That's what brings us here today. So I thought I would start at the beginning and ask you to tell us about how your philanthropy got started. Were you a philanthropic child?

OK. Well, when I did start to make money, the first time I made a reasonable amount of money, I thought I would give a little bit of it away, which I did. In fact, it was to CARE. There's this outfit called CARE. So I gave some money to CARE. And then periodically, I would give a little money here, a little money there. I married Marilyn, who's sitting here in the front row. We were both giving money away in kind of random ways to good causes. And then she had the idea to make a foundation. That was in 1994. And I thought that was a pretty good idea, in particular because I could give money to the foundation, get a tax deduction, and not have to worry about exactly where the money was going to go.

So you could pile it up and give it out later. So we started this foundation. Marilyn ran it out of her dressing room, in one of those boxes or something, for a number of years. And finally, she hired her first employee. Now we have 350 employees. Is that right? 350? 350 employees. So the foundation grew. And the first science, meaningful science we did, in the field of autism. We have a relative on the autistic spectrum, and we were very interested in this condition. And, well, Columbia University said, “Oh, give us $10 million and we'll start an institute.” I said, “Well, maybe.” But someone else at Columbia said, “Don't be so fast. You should learn more about the field.” So we had a roundtable. This was in June of 2003, where the head of the NIMH was there.

A number of very distinguished neuroscientists were there. And we had this roundtable for all day. And we came out of it realizing or learning two important things. One, the condition is highly genetic. If two identical twins, if one of them has autism, it's at least 90% that the other will. Not 100, but so, it's clearly highly genetic. And the second thing that we learned was, with a few exceptions, people working in the field were not such crackerjacks. It hadn't attracted, with a few exceptions, really first-class scientists. So that became our mission: OK, we'll focus on genetics and give grants where we might to very smart people who want to get into this field. And we gave a few grants, and they went OK.

But it wasn't long before I realized that, and I guess Marilyn realized too, that we really didn't know what we were doing in this grant process. It turned out we gave a couple of good grants, one in particular which was terrific, had a terrific result. But how do you really give grants, judge whether they're going to be good or bad? So we decided we needed someone to run this program. And I did a search. And it was a nice search. I formed the search committee. I got the president of Rockefeller University to be a member. I got Harold Varmus to be a member. And I had known this fellow, Jerry Fischbach, when he was head of the Columbia Medical School. And I thought he was a nice guy. He could be on the search committee.

And they said, “Yes, yes, he could be a great member.” So I had to interview him to see if he wanted to do it. We met over a pastrami sandwich. And we started talking about the job and so on. And he got more and more excited about it. And at a certain point, I said, “Do you want this job?” And he said, “Yes, maybe I do.” And after a week, he said, yeah, he wanted the job. So that was the end of the search committee. But that was very gratifying. So Jerry, who was a very distinguished neuroscientist, a member of the National Academy, he'd been head of neuroscience at Harvard and so on—he came to us. And that's when we began to build something professional in the way of giving money to science. He hired some people, knew how to do a call for grants, knew how to get people to review the grant applications, and so on.

And so he was the first scientist of note that joined us in the foundation. And he hired a few in-house scientists, but no one at the level of Jerry. And that went extremely well. We did a very big collection that had never been done before. We found a lot of genes that, indeed, mutations in which cause autism. So that was a successful program. Now, we were giving out money in other areas, but not so in such a formal manner. And we decided to make it more formal. Actually, Marilyn suggested we hire a guy named David Eisenbud, who had been head of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in California. And he was now finished doing that. And I invited him to head Math and Physical Sciences. He did.

We had some great programs. In fact, he called a meeting: first of theoretical physicists, then of mathematicians, and then of computer scientists—three separate meetings—asking each group, "What's the most important to you? What do you want?" Well, both the physicists and the mathematicians, they were theoretical. Physics—we wouldn't think of giving money to experimental physics, although in the future, subsequently we have done some of that. They were basically interested in individual grants to very smart people and a variety of different types of grants. And that was fine. But the computer scientists weren't so interested in grants. Their highest priority was an institute for theoretical computer science.

Now, there were a number of institutes for mathematics. There were a number of institutes for physics. But there was no institute for computer science. So we thought, "Well, OK, we'll do that." We had a big competition. We announced this. 18—no, 17—universities and a veterans hospital applied for this institute. Now, we quickly eliminated the veterans hospital, thinking that was not quite the right place to locate. And then these 17 universities got winnowed down to nine, and we came back to them. So they had to make a proposal, and the proposal had to include some money. What were they going to put in? So the nine came back again with improved proposals. And it was finally down to three, of which MIT was one, University of Chicago was the second, and Berkeley was the third.

I'm an alumnus of MIT, and I was an alumnus of Berkeley, because that's where I got my PhD. So anyway, I didn't want to interfere with this selection process. But it ended up Berkeley offered us a whole building. And that was more than either MIT or University of Chicago had offered, and so we built that. And I don't know if you've ever been there.

Oh, I have.

It's a great place, right?

It's a wonderful place. It was a real success, a real success. In fact, yeah, it was a real success. Now, the woman who now runs it, she has just come to run it, was at MIT, and she would have run it if it had been at MIT, a woman named Shafi Goldwasser. So now she has taken over from a fellow named Dick Karp, who I worried about at the beginning because he was kind of old. But he was apparently not that old because he did a wonderful job. And you know Dick Karp, of course.

I took a class from Dick Karp when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. He's a great guy.

He is a great guy, yeah. And respected by everybody. Oh, tremendously. So he was able to really gather great people around him. So that was... Finally, in Life Sciences, we brought on a woman. Well, she was first working in the autism group, but she was a little restless and more interested in other things besides autism per se. So she now heads a unit on Life Sciences, and we give a lot of grants and certain kinds of collaborations, which I'll get to. Now, am I going on too long, or do you have some other question you're burning to ask? I'm delighted to continue with the progression of the foundation, if that's OK with you.

It's your show.

OK, well. I have other questions, too, if you want. Well, I can finish this in another 80 minutes, I think. So there came a time when I got—I don't remember what the root of this was, but I got interested in the possibility of doing collaborations. Now, up till now, we had been giving individual grants, grants to individuals. Sometimes they work together or whatever, but it was typically grants to individuals. And I thought it might be a good idea to find a goal that one wants to work towards and do a collaboration among maybe 20 or 30 scientists, postdocs or whatever, and move science forward that way. So we had a meeting of a bunch of scientists. They were all hotshots, big shots. In fact, Eric Lander was supposed to chair that meeting.

But he had the poor taste to win a prize just before that, and he had to go collect the prize. So he couldn't chair the meeting. But David Baltimore chaired the meeting. But we had physicists and mathematicians and so on. And we met for two days in a sleepy little town up the Hudson River. And the conclusion was, yes, this is a good idea. If it's organized appropriately, this would be a good idea. And in fact, a few people came with ideas already for collaborations. That was in 2012. And we started doing these collaborations. And one of them was Origins of Life, for example. Now, we all want to know where we came from. But the NIH, I don't think, cares where we came from. So it's not so easy for life scientists to get money for that quest.

But it sure is interesting. And that collaboration is now in its sixth year. And we are getting closer to figuring it out. We're certainly not there yet. It's supposed to go on for 10 years. Will we be there in four more years? Probably not. And maybe we'll extend it longer. But we've made a lot of progress in Origins of Life. And now we have 16 collaborations. That's a big one. Anything in life science is very expensive. I want you to know that right off the bat. Mathematics and theoretical physics is cheap. You only need pencils and paper. But biology requires equipment, and that could be expensive. But we've started a lot of collaborations. One of them is co-headed by someone, I believe, in the audience here named Penny Chisholm.

Where's Penny? Where? Oh, she's very close here. There's Penny Chisholm. And I think she's the co-head of a collaboration called SCOPE. And SCOPE is trying to understand the microbial dynamics of our oceans and the microbial ecology of our oceans. And that's a really interesting and very complex subject. So, well, that's a collaboration that we have. I won't go through the litany of all. One is called The Global Brain, which is a very large neuroscience collaboration. And they're all going very well. So it was kind of a turning point. But one person there named Ingrid Daubechies, who is an applied mathematician of great distinction. She invented something called wavelets. Who's heard of a wavelet?

Look at that. So she has a big following. She invented wavelets. And she suggested that we do something with data analysis, not necessarily a collaboration, but do something in the area of data analysis. She may have hoped that we would set up an institute at Duke, which is where she was. But I thought, and Marilyn agreed, it was a great idea. After all, I made a lot of money doing data analysis. And in finance, we analyze a lot of data. So that appealed to me. But it also seemed reasonable just to do that in-house. Why set up an institute? We could just hire people, and they'd work in the foundation. So we started in the biology area. We hired a great applied mathematician who happened to be an MD, Leslie Greengard.

You know of Leslie Greengard? So he agreed to head this group. And it was quantitative or computational biology. And he built a very nice group of about 40 people, maybe 50 by then. And it was going wonderful, wonderfully. And they were doing very good work. As opposed to a university department, we could hire programmers. In departments, programming is typically done by graduate students or postdocs, and then they leave. And there's no one to maintain the code. And not only that, they might not have been such wonderful coders. But departments can't give tenure to computer programmers. They're not researchers, after all. So anyway, you can't do that. But we can. And our programmers, we hire stupendous programmers, very, very good programmers.

So anyway, that worked out so well, we decided to generalize the notion. And we knew we'd have to have a facility to do that because Leslie's group fit in our offices. But the rest of the foundation was growing as well. And we certainly couldn't have more such groups. So we took a building across the street that happened to be available. The guys wouldn't sell it to me, but they gave me a 35-year lease with a 15-year extension. Now, I don't expect to be around to sign that extension, although I might be around for some of those first 35 years. So that was great, and we renovated that building at quite a cost. Don't ever renovate a very old building if you could just tear it down and build it from scratch.

Renovations cost more than, you know, construction. But anyway.

Yeah, I think we know that at MIT.

Yes?

Yes, that renovating is expensive.

It's expensive. Yeah, you have to. Well, anyway, we renovated the building. It's a beautiful building. And our next thing was astrophysics, computational astrophysics. Now, for each of these units, just like we do for collaborations, we have a workshop first, decide is this a good idea or a bad idea, and so on. But astrophysics sounded interesting. I mean, we're all interested in what goes on out there. And so we did a workshop, which was organized by a fellow named David Spergel, who was at Princeton. And he got a group together. And the workshop was very good. And Spergel was terrific. So it seemed clear, yes, we should do this unit. And B, Spergel should lead it. And after a certain amount of courting, he agreed to do it.

And he's come. And that unit is complete now. It has 55 people in it. And he's done a stupendous job. Well, the next one, this building could hold four units. And the next one is something called quantum physics. Quantum physics is a kind of material science. It's a condensed matter physics. It's very, very different from astronomy, and it's different from particle physics. But it's a very interesting field, materials. So again, we had a workshop to see if this is a good idea. It was a good idea. There was a fellow named Antoine Georges. Now, four years earlier, we had started a collaboration called Many Electrons, which was kind of in the same field, the dynamics of electrons and materials and so on.

And when the workshop, we did the workshop, there were 20 people sitting around a table, and everyone said this or that and so on. They were all scientists. But when this fellow Antoine Georges opened his mouth, everyone got quiet right away to hear what Antoine had to say. I thought, well, Antoine would be a great guy to run this thing. First of all, he was a very distinguished scientist. And second of all, everyone likes to listen to him. And that was the hardest recruit, because he was in Europe and had three jobs. So well, he was at the Collège de France. He was at the Polytechnique. He was also at the University of Geneva. So, well, I had managed to pry him away from two of those jobs, and he finally agreed to come.

So he's with us three-quarters time, and one-quarter time he's back at the Collège de France. So now that unit now has 25 or 30 people. It's only been going for under two years, and it's terrific. They have all kinds of meetings, and people come for workshops from around the world, and so on. Now, we had room for one more, and there was a lot of debate that went on. What will the fourth unit be? We thought maybe it would be something in Earth science of some sort. But we couldn't really converge on anything. And then the idea was floated by someone, why don't we do a unit on computational mathematics? Now, on the face of it, that sounds kind of redundant. I mean, mathematics is computational, but of course,

It's also a lot of theorem-proving. I mean, pure mathematics, much of it is not computational at all. But by computational mathematics, we meant, or the guys who were proposing this meant, statistics, machine learning, algorithm development, numerical analysis, and something else, which I always forget. There's five things, and I always can only remember four at a time. But it was something else. Anyway, that's what that would be, and everyone—the three directors really liked this idea because that unit they saw as being able to glue the other three units together. The other three units are all using mathematics, certainly, because it's computational stuff. And there were interactions between, let's say, quantum physics and astrophysics, but they weren't big interactions.

And I wanted more collaboration even between units. And so we decided to do computational mathematics. And that's just started. And that will get built up to 50, 55 people. And so along the way, we decided to call this the Flatiron Institute. Now, why that? Because it's in the Flatiron District of New York, a couple blocks away from the famous Flatiron Building. So we call it the Flatiron Institute. Everyone liked the name. And it's just going great guns. So that's pretty much where we are. We may add a fifth unit, but that would be the last one. And that's not a definite yet. So I think two things that distinguish our foundation. Oh, also, we do outreach and education in the foundation. And we publish a—has anyone ever heard of Quanta Magazine?

Do you know Quanta? Yeah, pretty good. Marilyn oversees that and our other outreach. We've made some movies and stuff like that. And how many? We have six million viewers of Quanta or something like that. Six million. And six of them are right in this room. I don't know where the other six million minus six is. So about 10% of our effort goes to outreach and education. And you're probably going to ask me about Math for America, because I'm finished describing the foundation.

Yeah, this is one of the more easy interviewing experiences that I've had. Well, I was going to ask you about Math for America, but maybe even before that, I don't know if you can answer this question, but what motivates your philanthropy? Is it curiosity, or the people that you work with, a sense of giving back? Is it a mix of those, or can you speak to that?

Yeah. I think all the things that you said. I enjoy it. I enjoy being around scientists. Marilyn likes scientists, too. So she likes science. We both like science. But yeah, I'm curious about a lot of things. I really would like to know the origins of life, how life originated, and maybe the answers to some easier questions. So I like it. And by establishing this, it's established in perpetuity. It has a very, very, very good endowment. And what else am I going to do with my money? I mean, I've given some to my kids and so on. But what else am I going to do with the money? And it's enjoyable. It's really enjoyable. And I can partner with my wife. See, we've never bickered, which is not trivial, by the way.

It can have its rough spots. But on the whole, it's been great. Does that answer your question?

I think so. Let's see. Well, why don't we talk about Math for America since you mentioned it?

Yeah. Now, Math for America. It's a fact in the United States that STEM education is very poor in middle schools and secondary schools, in middle school and high school. It's not so good in the law grades either. We don't stack up in standardized math tests to any of the developed countries. We're at the bottom of the heap in how our kids do in these standardized tests. Now, you might say, well, you know we're a very heterogeneous population, and so on. That's not the reason. Our best 10% don't do as well as their best 10%. So why is that? Well, it's pretty clear to me. that our teachers of mathematics, starting with math, because we'll get into science in a minute. But our teachers of mathematics, in many cases, don't know very much mathematics.

They just don't. I mean, if you want a teacher, you want your teacher to know the subject that he or she is teaching and to love the subject. But they're few and far between. They exist. There are some good teachers, knowledgeable teachers, but we don't have enough. Now, why is that? Well, high school, let's say high school teaching, middle school teaching, it doesn't have all the respect in the world as a job. It should, but it doesn't. Moreover, if you know enough math to teach high school math, you probably know enough math to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or someplace that begins with a G. There are a lot of places beginning with G. So that's a problem. When I was a kid, there were no computers whatsoever.

If you liked math, you know, being a math teacher was a pretty good job, if you liked math. You could be a bookkeeper or an accountant or something like that, and that would be fine. And women, who couldn't even become engineers in those days, because if you're a woman, you couldn't do engineering, a woman who liked math, that was a very good job for her. But today, the pull out of the classroom is very strong. Because, like I say, if you know enough math to properly teach high school math, you could get a job at Google at maybe twice the salary or, anyway, a good deal more. And you'd get more respect. "Oh, I work for Google." "Oh, really? Tell me about it." "Oh, I'm a ninth-grade teacher in such-and-such a junior high school."

"Oh, yeah? Nice." But it's not the same. So it's my view that people work for a combination of money and respect. So a lawyer might aspire to, "Someday I could be a Supreme Court justice." Well, he's not going to make a fortune as a Supreme Court justice, but you get a lot of respect if you're, you know, it's a job that anyone would be very, very proud of. So what we do is, so this is how it works. People, teachers themselves, if they've had three years' experience or more, can apply to become members of a corps. It's a corps of teachers. They first have to take a test of knowledge. If they pass the test at an adequately high level, then they come in. They're interviewed. They have to do a little sample class to show that not only do they know math, but they know how to teach it.

And then they come into the corps. Now, they get $15,000 a year on top of their salary. Now, their salaries are maybe $75,000. So $15,000, well, it's not game-changing. But it's nice, another $15,000. And they meet to do professional development. We have courses that they take and give to each other. Most of the courses are taught by the teachers themselves. And their esprit de corps is terrific. They are very proud of this organization. Now, four or five years ago, we started to include science. And now there are, in New York City, 1,000 members of the Math for America corps, half of them teaching math and half of them teaching biology and chemistry and physics and the other thing. And that's about right for the classrooms.

There's a lot more math taught than any of those others. And they are so enthused and so terrific. And their students, in every course, their students do better than the average student. And we went through all the courses. And they're leaders in their schools. And so it's a great program. And you're appointed for four years. You can reapply. And many people do reapply, and a meaningful fraction of them get accepted again. And we have a few who are now in their fourth term. So, and there's 1,000. Now, 1,000 is 10% of all the math and science teachers in New York public schools, in the middle and upper and high school. Well, there aren't any in lower schools. So we have 10% of all the teachers. And the state of New York likes the program.

So they have almost the identical program outside of New York City. And they, too, have about 1,000 teachers. It's about 10%. New York City is about half of the population of New York State. So it's about the same size. And that's going wonderfully. So that's Math for America. We didn't change it to Math and Science for America. It just sounded kind of dorky. Well, we had one name. So go ahead.

No, I think it's a tremendously important program. My father was a high school math teacher. And you're right. Back in those days, there were fewer opportunities available. But he also loved doing it. Yeah, I'm sure he would have. It's a great job. And I think I can owe my own—both my love of mathematics and also my love of teaching—to him. But how did you get started with—Math for America seems a little bit of an outlier relative to the other kinds of things you do, which are mainly supporting science itself. Was that Marilyn's idea? No, it wasn't Marilyn's idea.

Well, I had this idea years ago. And because it was clear—the problem was clear to me. And well before—I neglected to say that after I retired from Renaissance, I've been more or less full-time with the foundation. But this is way before that. I saw this as a problem, and it looked to me like it could be relatively easily solved with a federal program. Now, because I could see we're competing—our country is competing with all these other countries. And, well, more and more of the economy is quantitatively driven. And we need—you know, we're not doing our job in training our kids. I was the beneficiary of a program years ago called the National Defense Education Act. That was formed in the wake of Sputnik, which I think went up in 1958.

And that really shook up America. The Russians are ahead of us. Soon they'd be on the moon throwing vodka at us or something. There was a real panic. And the conclusion was, we don't have enough scientists. We don't have enough mathematicians and physicists. They weren't focusing on biological science. They were focusing on math and physics, electrical engineering, that kind of stuff. We don't have enough. So they made this big program. And part of the program was fellowships, graduate fellowships. And I got one. And I was the first person in the United States to get his PhD under the auspices of the National Defense Education Act. Now, someone had to be first. And anyway, it was I. Now, the number of PhDs in math granted...

in my year, 1961, was about 100. 10 years later, it was 1,400. So all kinds of people got drawn into math and science, and at least the non-life science. Salaries went up very fast. Academic salaries went up quite quickly in those fields. And so I saw, hey, there's a national program that could work. I said, OK, now we have this need. It's not Russia who we're trying to best. We're competing with everybody. So I had supported a guy named Schumer to run for Senate. That was, I guess, 20 years ago, probably. He was the first politician I'd ever supported, never mind why, but I supported him. And he won. And as soon as he was in office, I went down to talk to him about this program. I wanted to do a national program, a national program.

And he said, "It's a great idea. It's a great idea. I'll get right on it." And as I left, I was standing outside his office for a little while for some reason, and I heard him say to the next group, "It's a great idea, it's a great idea, I'm going to get right on it." Well, I love Schumer, but he didn't get right on it. And it sounded a little—I think it sounded a little oddball. I don't know. And he worried about, or people worried about, how would the unions deal with it? P.S., the unions are totally fine with it because the money doesn't come out of the school system. It's like manna from heaven. It comes from us. But if it came from the federal government, it would be the same. So my real goal, and I'm marching down to Washington after the next presidential election, and I think I'll have a little more clout, is to have something called

the National Science Corps, which is a corps of teachers. There are 500,000 math and science teachers in the United States, 500,000. If 10 percent of them were in this corps, that would be 50,000 people. And if it cost $20,000 a head, say $15,000 for the top-up in salary and $5,000 for administrative expenses, it would cost a billion dollars a year. Now, a billion dollars a year is a rounding error in our budget. It's a rounding error in the Department of Education's budget. We went to Obama with this idea, and he liked it, and tried to sell it to his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who didn't like it at all, and so it never floated. He wanted to get rid of bad teachers, fix bad teachers and get rid of them.

What I want to do is recognize and reward the good ones. Because that's what produces morale. In any company, if you're running a company, okay, if someone's not good, you've got to throw them out. But if someone is good, he wants to be recognized, or she, and rewarded appropriately. And that's how you keep up morale. You do a good job, you're recognized for it. So that's what this corps is doing. And we really hope that we'll make this a national corps. I'd like you all to write your congressman and senator to—well, you don't have to do that. But if you want to do that, ask them about something like that. So yeah, which is a little different from other things that we do in the foundation.

But it's a good project. I think it's great. I really do. Let's go back a little bit to the science side of things. So you have these several different areas within the Flatiron that you're supporting. And I think one of the things that is a hallmark of yours is that you have great taste in areas and in big questions. So like the origin of life. What are the other questions that interest you that you kind of try to make advance within the...?

Well, I like origins questions. We do have a small collaboration on the origin of the universe. But I have a big telescope project that's in that area. So I'll tell you. So we're putting up a telescope array at the Atacama Desert in Chile, 17,000 feet high. And it's in the microwave frequency. They're not optical telescopes. They're microwave telescopes. How many people have heard of the cosmic microwave background? Okay, we're at MIT. Okay, it's a majority of the people know about the cosmic microwave background. But it's something that occurred right in the Big Bang or whatever it was at the very, very beginning. And it was discovered about 50 years ago to exist. Examining it can get pretty good evidence as to what happened at the beginning.

Now, there's a theory, and one of the professors here at MIT, Guth, was one of the fathers of this theory, called inflation. Now, inflation was supposed to have occurred in the first many, many, many, many microseconds of the universe when it started with a point, let's say, and it inflated with incredible rapidity, much, much faster than the speed of light. It just zoomed. Now, that inflation should have caused gravitational waves, primordial. They're called primordial gravitational waves. Because, well, now most of you have heard of gravitational waves. Two black holes crashing and stuff like that make these waves. It's fantastic. LIGO is a fantastic thing. But inflation hypothesizes that there will be these primordial gravitational waves.

Now, the only way to see them is through the cosmic microwave background and getting enough accuracy in measuring it so you could see such a pattern. Now, three years ago, or maybe now it's four years ago, a group at Harvard said, 'We found them. We found primordial gravitational waves.' And in fact, they're twice as strong as were theorized to be. Oh, okay, good. They found them. But within weeks, people in the know, in the real know, realized they didn't find them. And after a couple of months, they admitted that it was dust. 'We hadn't adjusted for dust, and that's really what we were seeing.' And so, okay. The instruments that we're building. So this is a combination of Princeton, UCSD, and University of Pennsylvania.

And we're putting up the money. They're putting up a little. We're putting up a lot. And I'm very excited about this. So personally, I don't think we're going to find them. But we can drive the size down to within 1 tenth of what they're theorized to be. We can really see this very, very accurately. And if there's no primordial gravitational waves, even at 10% of the strength that they were hypothesized to be, well, it's back to the drawing board. new theories of the origin of the universe will emerge. And some of them already have emerged. It's always been aesthetically unpleasant to me to think that time had a beginning. When we all think time will go forever, why shouldn't it have gone forever?

Why shouldn't it? I mean, the number line, you can go to the left, you can go to the right, it goes forever in both directions. Why not that? The hypothesis that our universe started from a point 14 billion years ago or so, I think its age is, doesn't seem so sensible. On the other hand, I mean, it's a no-lose proposition. If we find the primordial gravitational waves, everyone will get a Nobel Prize. And people will be dancing in the streets. And we can say, 'Oh, our foundation did that,' and so on, 'funded that.' But so either way, we win. But anyway, that's something.

Okay. Here's something I wanted to ask you. It gets a little deviating here, but more kind of science-y question, just your speculation. So you're making progress on trying to figure out the origins of life. And so do you have any opinion, I guess, as to whether there is life elsewhere, intelligent life, let's say, maybe, even elsewhere in the universe? Assuming we have intelligent life here.

Well, I do have opinions. They're not very strong. I would say, well, look, here's the thing. There's, I think, 10 to the 23 stars in the universe. 10 to the 23. That's a very, very big number. And from what we know, what we're seeing now, the expected number of planets around each star is bigger than one. So let's say, okay, 10 to the 23. They all have on the average one or more. Now, well, that's a huge number. So people think, 'My God, with all those opportunities for life, the universe must be teeming with life.' Oh, yeah, maybe. But maybe not. So one of the guys in this outfit, a guy named John Sutherland from Cambridge, he's in the Origins Collaboration. In fact, he's the co-head of it. A brilliant guy.

Now, we know that the atmospheres of exoplanets are seeded with organic molecules. These are not rare. They're common. In the dust of stars in formation, you can see these organic molecules. It's not that they're full of them, but there are organic molecules. So a rather common one is hydrogen cyanide. I always thought cyanide was something that kills you. But anyway, it's an organic compound, hydrogen cyanide. And John Sutherland traced a trail from hydrogen cyanide pretty much up to RNA. And I said, 'OK, hydrogen cyanide combines with blah, blah. And then blah, blah combines with blee, blee, and so on.' And maybe there were 10 or 15 steps. And finally, you got to there. I said, 'OK, John. Just give me the probability of every step occurring.'

I'll multiply all the probabilities together. And then I'll see what the likelihood was for life to have started on Earth. But he couldn't do that because he had no idea. They were plausible. Each of these combinations was plausible. It could have happened. But these things had to bump into each other somewhere. And so I think it's entirely possible that we're alone. It's entirely possible we're alone. It's also possible that there's a great deal of microbial life all over the place. That seems possible.

That narrows it down. Those two possibilities pretty much cover it. Yes. Yes. But if you had to bet one way or the other, you would bet on...?

I would bet that—the first question, I'd bet there isn't intelligent life. On the microbial level, I would bet there is. Oh, I see. I would bet there is. Now, even though you can get up to DNA or RNA, getting up to us humans, for better or worse, was quite a trail as well. And who knows? We had a good climate. We had this. We had that. So we had a lot of favorable things and probably a lot of luck. So that's why I'm not—oh, anyway, there's my answer. You want to make a bet?

How would you bet? Well, I would bet that there isn't life elsewhere. I think we're alone. Intelligent life? Any life. Oh, you think that would be—oh, that's—I mean, it's just too hard. I mean, until you have evolution—I mean, you can make RNA and stuff like that. But until you actually have evolution, you can't make progress. It's just a random thing. And then evolution itself, you need so many structures in place that had to come to be there without evolution. Yes. And it just seems so unlikely, even with so many planets.

Even with 10 to the 23? Yeah. Well, I can't disagree with you. So we don't have a bet after all.

We're on the same side, more or less. That sounds good. So I don't know. I thought maybe we would open it up to questions. So we have folks here with microphones. And who was supposed to be actually picking these?

Well, that was the first hand that went up right there. They'll give you a mic.

Thank you so much, Mr. Simons. Such a wonderful series of lectures. Today you were describing one person, Antoine Georges, as somebody that everybody would listen when he was talking. Could you describe or could you name one person or maybe one company in each field that you talked about in mathematics, in finance, hedge funds probably, and in foundations, one organization that when it talks, people listen?

You know, my ears aren't so good. Could you? Well, if I understood the question, he is suggesting for you to pick a leading person in each of the three areas—math, finance, and philanthropy—that people listen to. You know, you mentioned this Antoine Georges.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, in mathematics, there's quite a number of people that people listen to. It's a very big field, and there's more than a handful of great leaders in this field. Well, Michael Atiyah just died, but he's someone that everyone would listen to. Misha Gromov, everyone would listen to if they could understand his Russian, or his accent—his accent. So there's certainly very, very important mathematicians that if they speak, you listen. Now, in finance, did you mention, was that a field? Well, I don't know. I live in an apartment building where George Soros also lives. So I suppose he's worth listening to, although he talks an awful lot. You have to have patience. But he was certainly very successful.

I think there are some great investors. I guess Warren Buffett was a great investor, although someone told me his fund has underperformed the S&P for the last number of years. So that's entirely possible. But there certainly have been some excellent investors. So I guess those two. And as far as philanthropy, who was, well, let's see. Marilyn, help me. Who are some great philanthropists?

Okay, those are two very good examples, Bloomberg and Gates. Gates is certainly, I think he's wasted, but you're always going to waste some money. Not everything is going to work, so you're going to waste money sometimes. So those are two people. You know, everyone likes to think of Andrew Carnegie, who was a great philanthropist. He's not around anymore, so we can't chat with him. But we can chat with those other two if they'll talk to you. But does that answer your question? Yes. Okay. Okay.

I was wondering, your philanthropy of late's been in setting up things that more or less you have complete control of as opposed to giving money to universities. And I was wondering, anybody who gives an endowed chair to a university ends up knowing that the endowment is mostly used by the university, not to fund the chair, but for other things, and whether you think that perhaps universities are making a mistake to not give potential philanthropists more say about how their money is actually spent.

Well, so the question is, should a philanthropist who gives money to a university really care or get involved with how it's spent? Well, yes and no. If you don't have any particular field of interest, but you love the university that you went to, for example, and you think that they have a very good president who knows what he's doing, it's not unreasonable to say, 'Look, I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it the way you think best for the institution.' On the other hand, and we do that to a limited extent. We give money to MIT every year. Not a huge amount, but a meaningful... By the way, I'll just say something about MIT. We have 50 current grants, active grants, to people at MIT. They're all different people.

And that's more than to any other university. And it's not because I'm a big MIT fan. It's just because the applications for grants are so good from MIT. They get more than other people. We, of course, primarily, except for these places like MIT and places that we're on the board—Marilyn, we're on the board of Cold Spring Harbor and MIT and Rockefeller University. So we'll give money to that organization. Just do as you wish. But almost all the money that we give—and it almost all goes to people at universities—we're very interested in what they're going to do with it. And it's very designated. So I think it depends on the giver more than the policy. And so that's as well as I can answer that question.

Now, speak right into the mic.

I'll try. I lost my voice. As a philanthropist, how do you decide to determine whether you invest in unanswered questions versus unsolved problems—so things like sustainability or climate change versus the origin of life or questions that you have? How do you make that distinction?

Well, trying to distinguish between sort of fundamental unanswered questions in science and problems of society, like climate change and things of that kind. How do you write that down? Is that a fair...?

Yes. The world is full of good causes. Now, when you take climate change, my son happens to be a fanatic, working very, very hard. He's wealthy, and that's his main interest in life, is climate change and how to deal with it. And I think that's a very important thing. But the world is full of very important things. And we get asked, 'Oh, we want to do this. That's a great cause,' but we can't give to everything. And we want to be intelligent about what we do give. So narrowing it down to science, which is still a very broad area, makes it easier for us to do intelligent things. So criminal justice needs attention. I mean, there's all kinds of things that really need attention. And we can't do them all.

Hi. Thank you so much for coming to speak with us, not only today but also the past two weeks. My question for you is about endowments for nonprofit organizations. When you are thinking about your philanthropy, do you like to give to organizations that are going to use that money, or organizations that are going to take that money and use it in an endowment that's going to make their work sustainable in the long term?

Right. Almost all of the money we give is not for endowments. That's the answer to your question. We like to see it go into operations of the university. And of course, all these research grants, it's definitely not endowment. So we're not so interested typically in adding to the endowment. I want to add to our own endowment and make sure that that lasts for a long time.

I was wondering, with the rise of a lot of funds creating things called social impact funds that are trying to balance financial returns with also, like, philanthropic causes or more chasing things like sustainability, do you have an opinion on whether that's something, you know, that's viable, or should people really be pursuing strategies where, you know, they make money elsewhere and try to donate or support causes without expectation of any return?

OK, Mike. That's fine. So there are certain kinds of funds which take into account the social impact—social impact funds—which mix the investment funds with the impact on society. And the question is, is it a good idea to invest in those or to try to maximize return by investing in a pure, a pure fund that doesn't have other objectives, and then using the money for social values? Yes.

The second is pretty much my philosophy. When I invest in a company, unless it's a company that's doing terrible things, when I invest in a company, what I really care about is, is this company going to succeed, not is it doing good in some way or other. I don't want a company that's doing bad. So that's been my philosophy in giving.

Next question? Yep. So first of all, I'm on YouTube, and I get notifications from the Simons Institute about lectures posted every day. And now I finally know why it's called the Simons Institute. So thank you so much for that. About my question: do you support nonprofit or educational institutions abroad that are focusing on math and science education?

Do we support? Do you support institutions abroad that focus on education?

No. Well, we support some universities abroad, which of course do education. But we support them for the science they're doing. We have grants to Cambridge. We have grants to many places abroad, but not for the pure education aspect of it. Was that your question? Yeah, that's what I meant. Yeah.

Math for America sounds terrific from everything you've said about it, and I'm interested: do you have metrics that gauge the results you're actually having on the students in New York City or other areas where the program's active?

You want to know what our metrics are for the students after they leave high school?

Well, yeah, do you track? I mean, you have the teachers coming, but are you tracking the effect that's on the students who are being taught by these teachers?

Yes, I understand the question, and the answer is no, we don't. We track their success in the classroom where they are, but we don't follow them. An awful lot of work, actually, to do that because, you see, our teachers are teaching 100,000 kids a year. So it would mean tracking 100,000 people in college every year. There's a new 100,000. I mean, it's an idea, but we don't do it. We don't do it.

Dr. Simons, thank you for coming today. You've been very successful. I was wondering if you could share with us some of your life principles or life lessons. Ah, principles.

My wife once asked me—in a talk I gave at MIT years ago, we were driving up here, and she said, 'You should finish up your...' I don't know what she said. Was it values? Values. She wanted to know my values. I mean, maybe having lived with me all this time, she probably knew my values or the lack thereof. So I said, 'Okay, I won't call them values, but I'll call them guiding principles.' Here are some of the guiding principles. Be guided by beauty. It's an aesthetic. And it could be the way a company runs, or it could be the way an experiment comes out, or it could be the way a theorem comes out on the science side. But there's a sense of beauty when something is really working well. And there's almost an aesthetic to it.

So that's one value. Work with the smartest people you can, hopefully smarter than you, because that amplifies your effect by working with very smart people. Now, the person who just asked the question seems to be leaving the room. Oh, no. I saw someone else leave the room. Okay. Keep standing so I can see who I'm talking to. So let's see. Don't give up easily. Stick to it—not to the point where it's clearly insane to go further, but be persistent. Be persistent. 'Don't give up easily' is one of my principles. The title of that talk was 'Mathematics, Common Sense, and Good Luck.' And I always say that that's the inverse order of importance. People underestimate the value in their lives of having some good luck, or maybe not.

So hope for good luck. Of course, you can't really do anything about it, but anyway, you can hope for it. So that's always been a principle or a value. And I probably have a few more, but I'm trying to remember. Marilyn, can you remember my values? Marry a pretty woman, if you happen to be a man.

Anyway, I think we're going to end on that note. So thank you, Jim. So just a few words. First of all, I want to thank our provost, Marty Schmidt, for being here with us today, the organizers, and all of you for coming. I hope that many of you have been inspired by Jim's example and will give generously to support science at MIT. And just in reflecting about these three talks—math, money, and making a difference—each of which would have been an extraordinary career on its own, even separately from one another, but Jim has managed to weave them all together into one extraordinary life. So everybody, Jim Simons.