James Harris Simons - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

James Harris Simons was born to a Jewish family, the only child of Marcia and Matthew Simons, and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father owned a shoe factory. He received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and a Doctor of Philosophy, also in mathematics, from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961 at the age of 23.

Between 1964 and 1968, he was on the research staff of the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Simons taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. In 1968, he was appointed chairman of the math department at Stony Brook University. Simons was asked by IBM in 1973 to attack the block cipher Lucifer, an early but direct precursor to the Data Encryption Standard (DES).

In 1976, Simons won the American Mathematical Society's Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, for work that involved a recasting of the subject of area minimizing multi-dimensional surfaces and characteristic forms. This resulted in his proof of the Bernstein conjecture up to real dimension 8, and an improvement of a certain "regularity" result of Wendell Fleming on a generalized Plateau's problem.

Simons' research involved the discovery and application of certain geometric measurements, and resulted in the Chern-Simons form (also known as Chern-Simons invariants, or Chern-Simons theory). In 1974, his theory was published in Characteristic Forms and Geometric Invariants, co-authored with the differential geometer Shiing-Shen Chern. The theory is used in theoretical physics, particularly string theory.

In 1978, he left academia to run an investment fund that traded in commodities and financial instruments on a discretionary basis. Jim has two grandchildren named Evan Simons and Alison Simons.