Philanthropy
The wealth that Simons has amassed funds his many philanthropic pursuits. Simons is a benefactor for the mathematical sciences, supporting research projects, chairs, and conferences in the United States and abroad.
Simons and his second wife, Marilyn Hawrys Simons, co-founded the Paul Simons Foundation, a charitable organization which supports projects related to education and health, in addition to scientific research. Marilyn serves as the foundation's President, while Jim serves as its Secretary and Treasurer. In memory of his son Paul, who he had with his first wife, Barbara Simons, he established Avalon Park, a 130-acre (0.53 km2) nature preserve in Stony Brook. In 1996, 34-year-old Paul was killed by a car while riding a bicycle near the Simons home. Another son, Nick Simons, drowned at age 24 while on a trip to Bali in Indonesia in 2003. Nick had worked in Nepal and the Simonses have become large donors to Nepalese healthcare through the Nick Simons Institute. Jim Simons also founded Math for America, a non-profit organization with the mission to significantly improve math education in public schools.
In early 2006, he led a group of directors of Renaissance Technologies Corporation and of Brookhaven Science Associates in donating $13 million to fund a budget shortfall of the Brookhaven National Laboratory that would have shut down the operations of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider for 2006.
Also in 2006 Simons donated $25 million to Stony Brook University through the Stony Brook Foundation. The gift is intended to benefit the Mathematics and Physics departments at the university.
On February 27, 2008, then Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced a $60 million donation by the Simons Foundation to found the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook, the largest gift to a public university in New York state history.
On December 14, 2011, James and Marilyn Simons donated an additional $150 million to Stony Brook University. The donation was accepted on behalf of the university by Gov. Andrew Cuomo at a ceremony held on the Stony Brook campus. In return, the state pledged an addition $35 million to the university, and passed legislation giving major SUNY campuses considerably more autonomy and managerial flexibility. These funds have been designated for the construction of a new medical research center, for the endowment of 35 professorial chairs, and for a large number of student scholarships at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
On May 1, 2012, UC Berkeley announced that the Paul Simons Foundation donated $60 million in order to establish the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley.
Read more about this topic: James Harris Simons
Famous quotes containing the word philanthropy:
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)