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.
Read more about this topic: James Harris Simons
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)