The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Jim Simons: Math, Codes, Hunting Talent, Stocks, & Science

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Jim Simons joins Lawrence for fascinating new and different take on the life of a man best known to the public for becoming a billionaire by using techniques from mathematics and statistics to revolutionize investing, but who has had numerous other careers, as a brilliant mathematician, academic leader, code breaker and science philanthropist. You can show your support and access exclusive bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/originspodcast Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins podcast. This week, my guest is a true Renaissance individual, Jim Simons, who's had at least three amazing careers. He's most well known to the public as the billionaire founder of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund firm, which established the modern era of what are called quantitative analysis and data mining in order to do stock trading. But Jim's had a distinguished career in mathematics before the, that, in fact, created something which has become very important in physics. And I first heard of Jim as a physicist for his contributions that had affected our understanding of what are called gauge

fields. And we talk about that in our discussion. Jim was not just an accomplished mathematician. He had a very interesting career as a codebreaker and then moved to become chair of the department at Stony Brook, the mathematics department at Stony Brook, building a very distinguished department there before switching careers completely and moving into creating what is now Renaissance technologies. Most of the discussions with Jim have focused, of course, on his stock career, but I wanted to talk about the influences that led him to be a mathematician and to think about the, create the tools that would later on be used to help him in his current career. And we discussed everything from the nature of mathematics and science

to the importance of empirical data and its use, and also to how the techniques that he's used in stock training may be relevant to the kind of things that AI is using now and some of the implications of that for the future. It was a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion. We also touched on Jim's interest in supporting science through the Simons Foundation and his interest in public understanding of science.

In fact, I first got to know Jim when I lectured at the World Science. Foundation, one of the things he supports. So I hope you'll enjoy this remarkable conversation with a remarkable individual, and I hope you'll get some new insights into Jim Simons. For those of you watching this on YouTube, I hope you'll subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. Only a few percent of the people who actually watch our program subscribe to it on YouTube, and by subscribing to it, you'll learn about new podcasts, and you'll be able to participate in other aspects of our, of our...

of our podcast and our foundation. Also, if you would be interested in supporting the foundation directly through a Patreon subscription, that would be very helpful. If you have a Patreon subscription, you can watch these podcasts without advertisements and also to participate in other things like our monthly live Q&A with me on a variety of subjects and other programs that we're involved in. So I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I hope you'll help support us through either subscribing to us on YouTube or subscribing to us on Patreon. Thanks again. Well, Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on this podcast. It's a real pleasure to see you again and real privilege to be able to talk to you. So thanks for coming. Okay. Well, happy to do it, I think. Well, we'll see in the

end if you have if you do it. I already have benefited tremendously from this without even an initial talking to you about it because you'll see that I actually learned that you had a huge impact on my life, without knowing that you had until I began to research more about you before doing this. You know, I know we've talked a number of times and over the years and I knew some things, but it was fascinating to learn more. You know, I've also watched some interviews with you, and I want to try and do, you know, our discussion to be somewhat different, and I hope it will be covering some different things. But this is the Origins podcast, and I do want to go over.

your origins and I've noticed you say a number of times that you always like math that you always like math as a child but but I haven't heard you say why what was it about math that that well what was it about math that made me like it I don't have the famous the faintest idea I just I just liked it I liked counting I liked doubling two four 8, 16, all the way up to 1,000, 28, or whatever it is. That was far enough for me. But I would do that often, actually.

When you say often, how young, just when you first learned again? Three or four, when I'd learned to count. And you knew it was math. I mean, the point is that you recognize it as mathematics. Well, I didn't know mathematics. I knew counting. But I did something very early in my life that showed I must have some ability. Maybe I was four years old and we were driving.

I was driving with my father and he says he had to go to the gas station to get gas. And I said, well, why do you need to get gas? He says, well, we could run out. And I thought for a minute and I said, well, you shouldn't be able to run out. You just use half of what's in the tank. Then you use half of that and half of that and half of that and half of that and half of that. And you'll never run out. That was like Zeno's paradox.

Yeah, you had rediscovered Zeno's paradox at age. I did. On the other hand, it didn't occur to me. Yes, but we wouldn't get very far either. Exactly. Well, no, in fact, okay. Now, I've heard you mentioned the Xenos, this be a paradox and discovering it when you're young, which is fascinating.

And the fact that you hadn't occurred that you wouldn't get very far. But one thing I hadn't heard and I wanted to ask you about that specific story, so I'm glad you brought it up, was who, did anyone give you the resolution? I mean, did did, do dad say anything or did anyone, when did you come to realize that that paradox was sort of solvable or at least finite? I mean, was it much later? I don't remember. I don't remember. Well, let me go back then to actually,

you interacting with your dad there, because I wanted to talk about the influence your parents may or may not have had on you, in terms of your interest in math or science or anything else. Your father was a businessman or no? Yeah, well, he was in business. He was first. He worked for 20th century Fox all his young life, actually.

He graduated eighth grade, and then I think he actually took a job with them, delivering films or something. And he went to night school, but he kept falling asleep. So he didn't finish night school at all. So here's what 20th century Fox. In those days, well, in those days, he became a salesman after a while. And in those days, the movie company would have five films that they were peddling at a time. And you had to take all five. So the theaters had to take all five.

Now, luckily, they had Shirley Temple. Yes, sure. Everybody wanted Shirley Temple. So as long as the five had a Shirley Temple in it, which it didn't always, of course, they would take all five. So he drove he drove around later in New England and I have a distinct memory

and I was quite little of my mother leaning over me in the crib saying I hope you follow is going to be all right. And I think that was the hurricane. There was a very big hurricane in New England.

And I think that that was the hurricane and he was out on the road somewhere. But anyway, he drove around and then he became the sales manager. And so he could stay home and, you know, work from the office at home. and then and he did okay my grandfather who had a shoe factory and was a wealthy guy

in Boston or in Massachusetts it was in Haveral the factory was in Haveral which was North North Carolina Massachusetts

and he told them oh he would do fine and he'd get a piece of the business So my father took the job, but he really didn't like it. He really didn't like it. And it's forgetting a piece of the business, it turned out my grandfather made a lot of money, but he also spent it as fast as he made it on horses. And when he was quite a womanizer, as it turned out.

I didn't know that when I was young, but he, you know, he liked the ladies. So my father just kept working for him. He probably got a raise of some sort, but he really didn't like the job, but he, well, that was it. He didn't like the job, but he stuck with it. He did stick with it. a while finally my grandfather sold the shoe factory and he went to work for the guy who bought it and uh so he was my father was in the shoe business for many years interesting so was my father in a in a different way my father just sold shoes was didn't make him um did now he so he had a

he had an eighth grade education when he went out to work and then he tried to do night school So did he never had a high school degree or anything like that? He took a course once at Harvard, an extension course or something. Maybe that was in business or I don't know what the course was. Okay. Now your mother, did she have any more education than him or no? Yeah, yeah. My mother had a high school education.

In those days, not someone. many women went to college. Sure. And she didn't go to college, but she did go to art school. She was a pretty good painter. And she went to art school and some kind of finishing school, I think, whatever they call it. But she didn't go to college. And I was an only child, not for want of trying, but my mother had four miscarriages after I was born. Wow. turned out that there was something wrong with her uterus and she had to have what's called a hysterectomy, which they removed the uterus and you can't have any more children. And so, of course, I didn't know this at the time that she'd had a hysterectomy.

I knew she went to the hospital and I missed her. Kids weren't allowed in the hospital at that time. But my father took me to the back of the hospital, and my mother came to the window. That gave the confidence that my mother was still around. Okay, now this is interesting because I was wondering whether either of them encouraged. Well, look, first of all, I assume neither of my parents finished high school, and I was a young Jewish kid, and they wanted me to be a professional. I would be surprised.

They wanted me to get an education in particular. They wanted me to get an education. So I'm assuming the same thing for you. Did they encourage you to, they wanted you to get an education because they had not? Oh, definitely. They wanted me to get an education. And, well, I went, I grew up in Brookline, Mass, which is a suburb of Boston. and we lived in an apartment building.

And in fact, about three or four months ago, I got a yen to go back to Brookline and walk around and see what it was. And Marilyn, my wife, came with me. And the first place we went to was the apartment building in which I grew up. And I hoped that I could see it again. We ran the superintendent's bell, but no response. So we just went up to the door and buzzed the number. She made some noises, but we couldn't make it.

So we just walked up the two flights. It was on the third floor, but we were already on the first floor. And knocked in the door and she opened it. We explained who we were. And she was delighted to let us in. Oh, wow. So if I'd been alone, she might have been a little more dubious, but since I had my one. Yeah, sure.

Well, look, sorry, go on. So I grew up in Brookline. And, but in the, and I went through the ninth grade in Brookline High. But then my parents bought a house in Newton, a small house. And that was great. I love that little house. But one thing, it had two bathrooms. It's very important for a teenager, I guess.

When I was a little kid, you know, sometimes I'm running home because I needed to use the bathroom and someone was in it. Here I was a wow, two bathrooms. I'll always be free. and then I went to Newton High School. And Newton High School actually started in sophomore year because they had junior highs, Brooklyn did. So I entered Newton High School

and it was a very good high school. Sure. And I got a good education there. And of course, I really liked math. And I had a terrific math teacher. I was going to ask if you had good math teachers. I mean, well, getting a hand of myself, but one of the many things you've done is support math for America

and the importance of good teachers. So I wondered, I've heard a variety of things. Some people do very well with no good teachers. But you had good teachers that encouraged you, eh? Yeah, he encouraged me. He taught plain geometry. You know, his theorems and proofs. I love that stuff.

Me too. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah. Did you, can I ask you, that just to raise the question, one of the most things that was fun, geometry was probably the most fun, I think, maybe in high school, but one of the reasons was, and I don't know if this ever happened to you, but there'd be proofs you'd have to give for certain things,

and they'd be on quizzes sometimes, and it was always such a thrill when I happened to come up with a proof, which was not the proof that, that, that, that was in the book or that the teacher was expecting. And it's such a, it's such a reinforcement when you realize, hey, I've done something different. Did that happen to you? I don't recall that. I don't recall that happening to me.

It certainly may have. This was when advanced placement was just starting. And Newton High was a guinea pick for that. So it was called the. Kenyan plan and so I I think I got some calculus even as a junior that's great and then as a senior and well I just I loved it and I tutored math and I real to young kids yeah to kids who didn't do so well yeah and it paid pretty well and I really enjoyed tutoring. It was very satisfying when, let's say, I'm thinking of a girl in particular,

when she took her test, she did okay. Yeah. And she certainly wouldn't have done okay if I hadn't been tutoring her. And it's still was that true with a guy. So I did some tutoring and I worked in a, I always wanted to work. I always wanted to work. And, uh, had a funny experience over Christmas, I think it was this sophomore year. It was my sophomore year, which was my first year. There was a store, garden supply store called Brex, not so far from the house. And they hired me to work in the stock room after school. But I was terrible in the stock.

room because there was no rhyme or reason of where the stock was kept. It wasn't alphabetical or anything like that. I was supposed to bring up the stock to the main floor or put it away. And the couple who ran that stock room was a little frustrated with my in abilities. So, okay, your job is now floor sweeping. Okay. That you could do. I love that job because I could just push the sawdust around, sweep the floor, and think.

And I love just thinking. So at the end of the season, they talked to me. We sat down. They said, well, what are you going to do when you grow up? And I said, oh, I'm going to study mathematics at MIT. They laughed so hot. They didn't see that. I didn't see the connection that those of us who are academics clearly seen between pushing a broom around and thinking and sitting in a desk.

Yeah, right. So they laughed. But I think about MIT and study mathematics. And you never, I think you never went back and sort of said, I told you so to them. No, I did not. The next year I got a nice job as a soda jerk in a drugstore. I worked there from 3 o'clock in the afternoon till 6. And I really liked that job.

65 cents an hour. And I got my first girlfriend there, a girl who she came in to buy something or I said at the counter. And I always worked with my honor. my shirt rolled up up just above my elbows and she said she was kidding around and she said don't your elbows get cold I said well and the next day she came in with elbow warmers that she didn't who wouldn't woman triangles just for elbows with some straps so I thought I think this girl I

me. I figure, yeah, yeah, that was pretty good guess. She became my first ice school girlfriend. Oh, that's a lovely story. Did you get to also drink all the profit, not all your profits, but I suppose you allowed as many sodas as you wanted while you were working there? Yes, I could. I didn't like sodas, but I have ice cream. I could have ice cream. A funny thing happened there. A couple of funny things. A woman came into a store, and she was, She wasn't soda phone. She wanted some aspirin. I think she wanted three things.

And I knew what that cost. And I added it up in my head and said, okay, it's $4.95 or whatever it was. And the owner of the store came rushing out and said, didn't you do that on the cash register? Because there was an adding fund. I said, no, I just did it at my head. well he did it on the

class register and he got the same answer I did from then on when doctors came in because he loved doctors because he made most of his money giving descriptions and he would call me over and said watch this

and then he'd rattle off three or four numbers maybe they were even big numbers how much is that and well I gave an answer or sometimes it was right, sometimes it was right, but no one knew. And so I've touted me as a genius. Oh, that's nice.

Well, you mentioned doctors, and I want to get there in a second because when we get your, well, let's go back to your parents for a second. So they wanted to be educated. Did they want you to be a doctor? they wanted me to be a doctor? Did they encourage an interest in science or math? Did they knew you were interested in it? Did your parents specifically encouraged?

The one who wanted me to be a doctor was our doctor. Yeah, that's what I heard, actually. Your doctor wanted to be a doctor. Doctor wanted to be a doctor. He knew I was a smart boy, and a doctor's a great job. And I didn't want to be a doctor. But I said, you know, I want to be a scientist of some sort. I knew enough to know that.

And he said, yeah, but you can't make any money that way. Well, I fooled him too. You fooled him too. That's right. But it took a long time. Yeah, no, it's interesting because my family doctor wanted me, my parents wanted me to be a doctor, desperately, and my brother to be a lawyer, and he became a lawyer.

And then there was more pressure on me. And my family doctor was a person I revered, actually, because I was, because my mother had made, I would say the mistake of encouraging me to wanting me to be a doctor and telling me that doctors were scientists. And that got me interested in science. Yeah, well, doctor, well, to some extent, and to some extent they were. But you were much wise with me. You knew right away you didn't want to be. It took me a long time. I was probably on my second last year of high school before I suddenly realized that I liked science and that doctors weren't necessarily scientists. So it was a big blow for my mother.

but in your case it was just the it was your family doctor who but you know you wanted to do math and you knew you wanted to go to MIT you even told that I thought I'd go to MIT I also applied to the University of Chicago where I was accepted and I was I applied to Princeton where they didn't accept me and Brown where they didn't accept me but MIT and University of Chicago but two places that were better than Brown. Yeah. In math, especially. Yeah.

So I decided to go to MIT. It was close to home. Is that the reason I was wondering whether it was because it was close to home? It was close to home. And I went to MIT. And I graduated in three years, actually, because I had taken calculus one in high school, so I skip, skip that. At MIT, in those days, if you studied a course, you didn't take the course, but if you studied it on your own and passed the final, you'd get credit for the course.

So I did that in a few cases, and I took a course in summer school, and so I graduated in three years. And I took a lot of math. Even in my freshman year in the second semester, I took a graduate course, which was, it said no prerequisites. So I said, oh, great. And it was abstract algebra, which is what the course was. And, well, I passed it, but I found it, confusing. I didn't really understand why they were doing some of the things that they were doing. But that summer, I got a book on the subject, and within a week or two, it clarified, became totally clear why they were doing these things. And so I took the subsequent course in the next two, you know, for two years there were all on books, which got tougher and tougher.

and I think I was the only undergraduate in those courses. But so I took a lot of math. Now, you know, by the way, I should add that, you know, I think that policy, well, I know they have that policy at least when I did my Ph.D. at MIT, and that for me was a saving grace policy of not having to take the classes. They had these qualifying exams for your Ph.D. and these and and and the general rule was you took two years of courses and then took the qualifying exams but they let you take the qualifying exams even if you hadn't taken the courses and I gambled

I thought I had an education candidate I thought it was good I thought I could fill in the holes and I and I passed those exams and that that allowed me to to and what did you study at MIT I did my PhD in physics although it was at the time it was mathematical physics because we'll get to that because I did my undergraduate degree in mathematics and one in physics and And in fact, I want to ask you about that, because I want to ask you why math and not physics for you? I didn't like physics. Why didn't you like physics? I didn't like physics because, in some sense, I didn't know, let's take the notion of a force.

You know, what is a force? I walk away. You know, if they had written down a vector field. Yeah, over the real. But I just, I didn't like physics. I had to take a physics course. Sure. Yeah. You know, I didn't like physics. You know, I mean, the reason I'm asking is it fascinates me because, you know, I did, when I was an undergraduate, I also did history, but then I've been, my university, the most challenging course was you could do two degrees at one.

once if you did mathematics and physics and I thought okay I'll do that was up in Canada and and I thought okay I'll take that because it's challenging I thought you were at MIT you know no no I as my PhD as an undergrad I was in I was in Canada I went to MIT for my PhD and and so I took math and I took you know math with all these very very good math young math students and in physics and it was a revelation to me well first of all interestingly enough what you said resonated I did I did very I did very well in math but it was an abstract algebra course when I realized, and I got an A in it, I remember,

but I realized I had no idea why they were doing what they were doing. And that was when I realized that I wasn't, you know, that if I hadn't realized already that I wasn't a mathematician, that I could do math well, but I couldn't see where to go next. And whereas in physics, it was quite the opposite. And what was a revelation to me was there were a few kids in that math group who were much better mathematicians than me. And I thought for them physics would be a breeze. Because for me, physics and mathematics at the time seemed identical. And these kids couldn't do the, I found the physics courses very difficult. It flabbergasted me that I thought a good mathematician should automatically

be a good physicist. And it wasn't the case. It was a surprise to me. Sometimes the case, but sometimes isn't. Anyway, I did not like physics. Amazingly, some of the math that I did later in life. Of course, we'll get there. I knew you first as a for churned signs. I guess a lot of people did, but I want to get there slowly. You say didn't like physics, but you said something in an interview somewhere that I made that fascinated me because again, I guess I resonate with a number of the things you said in a number of different areas. But you said, you know, I was going to ask why geometry rather than algebra or number theory or what was it about geometry. And that's the fundamental question but let me preface a little at one point you talked about stokes theorem and how beautiful it was and

it is to me one of the most as it to me it's what encouraged me to be a physicist the beauty of strokes theorem that you could understand you know the details of going inside inside a volume by understanding what just happened you know i'm measuring things in the boundary and measuring that basically counting field lines going out of the boundary it was beautiful and i thought that's the beauty of physics but obviously for you that was the beauty of mathematics but you did say was it stokes theorem or something like it that encouraged you to why geometry and not the other areas of mathematics? Right. Well, I didn't like number theory particularly. And algebra I was good at, but when I started learning differential geometry, and I think it was there that we learned about differential

forms and the modern version of Stokes there. I was just blown away. And I knew that I wanted to study differential geometry. That would be my, that was what I wanted to study. And when I, so I graduated in three years. But I stayed as a graduate student for another year. And I worked with a guy named Singer. I know his singer, yeah. I know him.

Yeah. And he taught me Lee groups and Lee Algebras and that kind of things. I loved it all. Yeah. But then they suggested that since Churn was leaving the University of Chicago to go teach at Berkeley, I should go to Berkeley and work under Churn because he was the great man in differential geometry. So I said, okay, and I got a nice fellowship, and I went to Berkeley. Regrettably, Churn was celebrating his first year at Berkeley by taking a sabbatical week. Probably part of the deal he made. Probably was. So, yeah, I probably was in that.

So I worked with a different guy, and that worked out fine. Bertrand Kostin, right? Costant. Now, did he later on move to MIT? Yeah, because I thought I knew him when I was at MIT. I think I even, I know whether I sat in a class from him, but I, because we'll get to this. I used to, the geometry of gauge series was what caused me to want to go in to do my PhD at MIT. And so yeah, Kostin, I knew him.

Yeah, we hit it off pretty well. And there was a, and I just started dittling around with some, playing around with some theorems that I was creating. And he told me, although that's interesting. It might apply to this problem. That was an open problem. And but he said, but don't, don't. try that because singer couldn't do it and beryl couldn't do it okay so i don't think you're going to be able to do but that got me going of course that the challenge especially if you're young and ambitious

yeah i i uh just got further and further on it and um i actually uh shared shared what i was doing with singer by mail and he encouraged me oh that's good he was he was encouraging and uh and i got pretty far uh i got pretty far on it and uh that winter um we were going to go back to boston i had gotten married and while i wasn't berkeley and so he went back to boston to uh see our parents and all the rest. But I was stuck in this pyramid I was trying to prove. And I was stuck. And so Singer and I agreed to meet at his office.

It was a tremendous blizzard that day. But so we sat down and he said, okay, where are you stuck? And I said, I'm stuck here. And he looked and said, but you haven't used your own hypothesis. I said, about whatever it was. And I said, oh. And I instantly became unstuck. Because I could see, oh, if I'd use that part of the hypothesis, it was that, well, I can't remember the word.

But anyway, so that was great. And I got unstuck. But it still took me a couple. It was about minimal surfaces or something? No, that was the... Later? Okay, sorry. No, this was about Holonomy groups.

Oh, Holonomy groups. Okay, yeah, that's right. Okay. And Singer was a very supportive. I mean, again, I remember as a physics student, it was terrifying for me to go approach a mathematician with question. He was very supportive and not intimidating as a teacher and as a human being, at least in my experience.

He was a great guy. I just wrote someone as a complying. filing a volume of sorts about singer and I just finished writing my piece. But Singer, he was a good friend. We didn't really work together, except when he was teaching me, league groups, that stuff. we were friends and at a certain point I learned through Cian Yang the Bohm Aronov, you know the Vome Aronov? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes everyone knows that although when it was first. Oh it wasn't known for a long time. I mean it wasn't appreciated I think for its importance so much later. It wasn't believed. Oh that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because it seemed you're right. It seemed like it flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Yeah. How could it be? So a number of people did the experiment. They got the same answer.

And then I think something in some part of physics, I'm trying to think the name, the area of physics, could prove it. It came out of, it could be proved by, I can't think of what that. It doesn't matter. I mean, yeah, I mean, quantum theory, quantum phases, well, anyway, it's, it's ubiquitous. Yeah, well, so I learned that from Yang, and, and Singer had, was in New York that year. I think he was at Rockerpillar and so we had dinner and I showed him

this Aronov bomb experiment and he he was you know thrilled by it and I think because in his older age he was doing physics

I was exactly I was going to say unlike you I was going to ask if he had that impact on you because he was a mathematician who when I knew him was definitely interested in physics but he didn't he didn't pass that down on to you when he was teaching you no not at all okay but but I think this inspired him because you could model it as a as a as a a flat vector bundle yeah that had holonomia and it was his sure that was the electron and so I think Etia and Atia started doing.

Yeah, the Etia Index The ETIA Singer Index theorem is related to that in a sense. Oh, yeah, but he had already done that. Yeah, yeah, but they exploited that kind of thinking. And in fact, well, you know, I was going to do this later, but since you've talked about Yang,

I have to jump ahead. Because I heard about your time, well, we'll get to when you were chair eventually, and in your experience, teaching Yang and, and others. there's math and physics. And that's when I have to say this now,

that's when I realized the incredible impact you had on me. Because when I was an undergraduate, up in Canada, I went down to Toronto. I wasn't in Toronto. I went down to Toronto, and I went to hear some public lectures by Frank Yang. And Yang at that time was talking about the geometry of gauge theories, fiber bundles.

And it was a revelation to me. and that's what I decided I wanted to work on and actually that's what I proposed that I wanted to work on and what eventually I think got me accepted to do my PhD at MIT and for a long time I actually worked on that was what I thought I'd be working on which is the geometry of gauge theories and and I and I remember I mean

there was a physicist Roman Jackief who was originally my supervisor who was a physicist very interested in mathematics at the time but that became very interesting and I remember even later on Stephen Weinberg who you probably know Nevi-Henamo he was a wonderful man but he when he learned I remember I was his class and when he learned that I knew about Geometry of Gage Series I was so it's very it's very humbling but very exciting he here he invited me to his house he basically pride me for information and as this humble graduate student to have this Nobel Prize when he physicists just wanted to learn everything about it.

It was fascinating. But now I realize I have you to thank for it because I think Yang's interest in geometry in fiber bundles and the Geometry series came from you. Is that not right? I think so, yes. He asked me for a book. So I gave him Steenrod's book.

But it was very hard for him to read. That was a tough book for a mathematician to read, let alone. But he did then understand. I gave a, he invited me to ask me to give a course, a seminar over lunch to his institute. So I did that as the smartest class I ever had. all terrific physicists and and I would say you know in physics you call it this we call it this and I try to get them not to use so many indices or indices I don't need all these

indices yeah so forth so it was a nice guess I gave maybe six of these lunch things and then they gave me a present, which was a giant dictionary. One of those who takes two arms to hold the dictionary. Because I'm a terrible. And they realize herbal spells and I said, maybe we'll give them a dictionary. Nowadays, you don't have to be a good speller thanks to computers. Those the early days you had to be.

Yeah, the indices is one interesting thing. You know, I'll tell you something else about Weinberg, which is interesting. You may not have heard. Because I took many of my graduate courses from Steve, and Steve was, you know, indices, there were indices everywhere. And in fact, his first book on general relativity is full of indices.

And that's how I learned general relativity. I picked up his book and read it. Actually, I took it first as a math course, as a graduate course when I was undergrad, not from physicists. But then later on, in life, when he redid his book on relativity, he basically said, you know,

okay, you know, differential forms are the way to really, really picture it. So he eventually came around himself to recognize the differential forms of a way to think about. Differential forms was a very interesting invention, actually. That and the D operator was all very, very beautiful. And that's, of course, the way that's what I like. learned at MIT with Stokes term. It was formulated with differential. Yeah, I didn't hear it as formulate as differential forms

so much later. Of course, I learned it from physics. And then it was only later. And that's, I guess that's what got me turned on to thinking about the math of being associated with physics. Now, you, so, okay, so, Kostin, you went back to MIT for a while. Yes, the same time as Kostin did. Oh, you moved together. Oh, interesting. Yes.

Ah, okay. He was a more instructor, and he, they gave him tenure, so I think he was an associate professor at MIT. And then you were there, then you went to Harvard from there, and is that right after you were at MIT? Sure. Yes, yes and no. I did go to Harvard. It turned out that I got interested in business. in that first year because I had some friends in Columbia, South America, two particular,

who had gone to MIT, and they were down there. They were doing different things, but I was certain that if they got together, they could make a good company, a manufacturing company of some sort. I had been to Columbia, when I graduated at MIT, I guess you probably know the story. Yeah, I knew you took a motorcycle or scooter trip or something like that. We took motor scooters. They had just come into Vogue. And we had lambretta's, I remember.

Wow. We were, it was Boston to Buenos Aires or bust. Amazing that you would think to doing that on a scooter. Yeah, well, we got halfway. We got the Bogota. That's still a heck, by the way, I have to ask. That's still a long way to go on a scooter. I had a motorcycle, and this wasn't comfortable enough,

but I can't imagine going thousands of miles on a scooter. We did. I almost died at one point, but I didn't. And we ended up in Bogota. And while the Jewish community in Bogota were astounded at us, so we would get invited to this and that and so on. Oh, that's nice. What I learned about Columbia then was that if something had been imported

and then you manufactured it there, imports would be blocked. So you could get a monopoly. Oh, I see. Because that was to encourage manufacturer in Columbia. Yeah. So anyway, in the middle of my first year at MIT, I went down for a week or so to Bogota and said,

I'm not going to leave until you found a business. Well, we found a business while I was there. And it was to manufacture vinyl floor tile. And that was not imported in. So we thought that would be good. So I scraped together a little money. And I managed to provide my uncle, rich uncle I had and my father. And so I had 10% of the business.

Oh, okay. And then I thought, maybe I'll go down there and work at that. This was after my first year as a more instructor. But I realized, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I want to keep doing math, but I had given up the more instructorship. But bought, whom I knew, said, oh, he was at Harvard.

I'll put you on a contract. He had an NSF contract or whatever. So I had, I was at Harvard for a year, just, I didn't have to teach. And then they made me a assistant professor. And that's when I was starting to work

on minimal, minimal surfaces and varieties. And, but the business wasn't working out so well, and I owed money, and I wanted to pay it off, and I learned about this place in Princeton called the Institute for Defense Analysis,

which was code cracking, highly classified place, and they hired mathematicians. So And they paid more, presumably. What? And they paid more, presumably, than being an assistant festival. They paid considerably more, considerably more.

And I got the job and moved to Princeton, and I was there for four years. Much of that time was working on this minimal variety area. I understand you were allowed to spend half time on math and half time on, on classified in principle cold cracking analyses about things that you weren't always aware of exactly what you're doing, but you were... And I learned about computers

there. They had a huge one for the day. It was equal to all the computing power in New Jersey when it came in. Wow. Was that your first experience? I was going to ask you that. It was on my list here. Was that your first direct

experience of working with computers? Well, yes and no. Yes, it was, but I didn't know how to program. And when I tried to learn, I was a terrible programmer because I have kind of a bad memory for local things. And I was a terrible pro, but they had good programmers there. But you were good at algorithms, but not implementing them in programming language. I mean, your algorithms are something you enjoyed, right? Developing algorithms. Very much. And I did one thing for them, which was very good.

There was a longstanding problem in the field. And I came up with an algorithm which would solve that problem. At least it would do, it would get the answer on thousands of times faster than they could. So that was really a good contribution. Sure, sure. Were you allowed to publish that or was that classified at the time? It's still classified. The NSA National Security Agency built a special purpose computer to implement the algorithm.

Oh, that's neat. And I found years and years later they were still using that. Wow. It makes you feel good. 9-11 period. They were still using that. Wow. my algorithm. So, but, but I, you know, I left. Well, now, yeah, I want to get to

you're leaving because there's an, I mean, I try to pick things from which I learned from your background that I think are interesting. But before we get there, because I think, um, the shift from Harvard to Princeton at one point, and maybe this was just an offhand remark to someone, you said that you found Harvard to be stuffy and not and a, and a, stuffy environment compared to MIT. And, and it's interesting, me because I went I was did my PhD at MIT and then I went to Harvard to something called the Society of Fellows and and which you must be aware of because the Simons Foundation has something called the Society of Fellows so I don't know if it's named after the Harvard side it seems

very familiar when I was just looking at it but I found the transition from MIT which is kind of a practical hardworking no-nonsense kind of place to Harvard to be a very interesting transition because I did find Harvard much more and the society of course is one of the more pretentious groups at Harvard. And it was a difficult transition for me. So I was intrigued to find out that you found it something similar. Yeah, I really didn't like Harvard. And I don't know why, really, but I found it stuffy. Yeah. But that was quite an honor to become a junior fellow at Harvard for you. Well, it was an honor for me. Yeah, I was shocked and surprised. eyes. And it was actually... Was it in math or was it in physics? It was in physics. That point,

I'd done my PhD in physics. There were some really good mathematicians there too, but, but, in fact, I was going to ask, it seemed to me, based on, well, I don't know how it was, but you could have, I'm surprised that you weren't considered for that. I don't know if that was operating then, but I think it was. Yeah, it was. It was operating. The Society of Fellows, it was an alternative. Maybe you'd already gotten your PhD. It was at that time, for many people, was an alternative to doing a PhD. By the time I got, became a junior fellow, at least in the sciences, most people already had their PhDs. In the humanities, the many people who had it, didn't have a PhD. And I have to say, by the way, that kind of honor, I don't know if you, maybe it didn't have,

it was very difficult for me because I was in that community of MIT, Harvard, which in the physics community was small enough so that I used to take my courses at Harvard and there were seminars back and forth. But I was a nobody as a graduate student. I mean, you know, I was who I was, but no one knew and then the minute I got appointed junior fellows, suddenly all of the faculty at Harvard knew who I was, and I had not done anything of significance that I could, that I was aware of. And it was a very difficult thing to have a very prestigious position. And at the time, feel like, did you have your PhD already? I, I had been, except, I've been named a junior fellow before. I got my PhD, but by the time I began, I had my PhD.

But still, it was very difficult to be surrounded by people and have this expectation that I was so, that I was something special when I hadn't really, in my mind, done anything special at all. And I found it took me about a half a year before I got over that, there's a syndrome or whatever it's called where you don't feel competent and you feel, I feel like, it felt like I was fooling everybody. But you didn't have to teach, I think. No, that was the best part. I didn't have to teach.

And the other thing that for me, that encouraged me, And I say this because I know that the Simon's Foundation and Euro interest are wide, not just supporting science, but also supporting popularization for science, which is obviously something I've been quite interested in for much of my life. The thing that the society encouraged me was to go beyond just physics. So while I was there, I actually, I decided I wanted to write some books more generally on science and culture. And it was while I was there that actually got my first contract to write a book. I didn't actually write that book, a particular book for later on. But the idea was that you should be free to do whatever you wanted for three years and unencumbered by anything, which is I understand the purpose of your assignments

fellowships. And it's a wonderful thing for young people now. And I guess I'll say this for the young people who are out there that, you know, there's so much pressure on people right now. And normally you had a postdoc and you have one or two years and you have to try and produce and show things to get your next job. And to have some time a three-year period, which is a. substantial amount of time where at least for the two first two years you're not really under any

pressure except to think is a very valuable thing it's almost as valuable probably as pushing a broom around and anyway in any case it was um yeah it was a it was a fortunate thing and and and i actually worked and interestingly enough that when i heard you mentioned bot at that time when i was at Harvard and bought at bot's group Raul's bot group was there was I remember sitting in a class for him when I was doing my my junior fellowship because I thought it was a time I should try and learn some math as well and and he was very interested in in in geometry and physics as well both he and singer became very interested in physics or potentially interested in physics I don't think at that time they were doing any physics I think that later what you mean later than when I was or you

Say it again. I mean, when I was there, they were interested in physics, but you're saying when you were talking to them, they weren't interested in physics. Yes. I don't think they were that interest in physics. I mean, Singer and Atia did the index theorem, which is not physics.

Maybe it could be used in physics, but the index theorem was a great result. So was church. Simons, which was pure mathematics and of course became, you know, that's before, yeah, that's how I first obviously knew of you as a, before I knew that, but the Simons Foundation about your work and business. And you've talked eloquently, I think very importantly about how, you know, I learned it turned out be very useful in gauge theories and trying to understand the topological properties of gauge theories. And then eventually became a interest, a whole new area of, of

mathematical physics called Churn Simon's theories. But the important thing was that you had no notion at the time of developing it that would have any application whatsoever, right, in physics. Absolutely no, none. I didn't know any physics or very little. But I thought the math was beautiful. It is. I got the, that was when I was a chair.

at Stony and I decided I wanted to learn really learn characteristic classes thoroughly. So I set myself a problem, you know, as a combinatorial formula for the Euler characteristic. Edges minus, you know, yeah, I know a formula. ... some of edges and faces and so on. I wanted to come up with such a thing for what's called the signature of a four manifold. And it's a nice construction, but I wanted to see if I could make a combinatorial version of that. And I started to work on it.

And I got pretty far, but then I got stuck on one term, which did not even. yield to anything. But it did turn out that it was a function that on a three manifold, which had very interesting properties. And that was the roots of turn shyments with a three manifold example. And it was, it was, it was, It was really quite a wonderful thing. This function,

it was a conformal invariant of a Romanian manifold manifold. It was a conformal invariant. It was only defined modulo, the integers. So, you know, 0.08 and 1.8 were the same. So it was, so it took values. You could think of as taking values in a circle. But anyway, it was interested in mod Z. And I showed that I went to calculate it for a three manifold,

sitting inside, immersed anyway, in force base. And I calculated the answer, and it came out to be zero. Zero, mod Z. Came up to be zero. and I thought, wow. Then I calculated it for three-dimensional projective space, and it came out to be a half. So then I realized, okay, so three-dimensional projective space

cannot be conformally immersed in our four. And anyway, I showed this stuff to Turner, and he just said, well, we could do this in all-dimensional, and not just three and I was a little dubious but we started working together and he was right and so that that became churned simons but it never entered my head that it would apply to physics yeah no it's I think that's I mean there are wonderful examples like that that I think are incredibly important and by the way you know it enters physics in a number of areas but but in particular to try and understand the prop gauge for the

listeners who aren't experts, gauge theories describe all the known forces of nature, really, and the fields that we now think of as electricity and magnetism and even gravity. And trying to understand the mathematics of these, it turns out what's called the topological properties or the properties that don't depend on sort of detailed natures of the spaces are very important in telling and useful to understand processing physics called instantons. And so this classification of churn Simons and something, the integral of which is something called an index, is very important.

But it was important, as you say, from a mathematician's point of view, because of its mathematical beauty without any knowledge at the time of gauge theories or what it would work on. And I wonder, I'll jump ahead because I was going to get, I suspect we're not going to get to the end of everything I want to get anyway, so I want to at least get some of these important questions. Nowadays, there is a great, over the last, one-season government in particular, and this has been true since I guess I've been a professional scientist,

this push for funding for applied problems to solve problems and less interest from the point of view of politicians, and sometimes, unfortunately, from the point of view of the public, in fundamental curiosity-driven research. And what people don't realize is that very few profoundly important applications have ever come out of people directly thinking about those applications, but rather came out of people like you working on something that was fascinating with no idea that later on it would have an application.

And so I wonder if you could comment. on that because I guess you have the luxury in some sense of funding with your foundation, potentially this, but in terms of the government and the pressures of the public to say, no, we want you to solve this applied problem. And, you know, if they'd wanted faster computers back then, they would have had faster pullies and wheels until someone developed a transistor related to something totally independent. Well, yes, we support primarily, although in one area we have a study on autism, which is applied. Yeah.

That's one of my treatments and so on. But the rest is just basic science. And I love basic science. And you're right. My favorite story is I-I-Raby. Yeah. So he invented or discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. and he won the Nobel Prize

and you know what it is or whatever people use it all the time now to see their bodies well exactly they won the Nobel Prize a few years later two guys came along I think they were German and realized you could analyze materials

with this and they won the Nobel Prize and subsequently another two people one of whom was at Stony Brook realized that you could take pictures. Now they didn't want to call it nuclear magnetic resin. They didn't want to word nuclear, it would frighten me.

So they called it magnetic resonance, magnetic resonance imaging. Imaging, yes. And now I don't think I, I. Arabi, he probably wasn't alive by then, but whatever dawned on him that there were machines implement things what he discovered all over the world thousands and thousands of machines that look at your shoulder or whatever you know it's i'll give you i'll add to that story for you a little bit because rabbi was one of the more influential physicists of his generation and had many great students and he

influenced a many people and one of the people who then took followed up on that field was a wonderful physicist named Ed Purcell, who was at Harvard. And actually, by the way, it was one of the people who interviewed me for the Society of fellows. But he was an amazing man. Every time I talked to him, I wanted to grow up and be a physicist. He was an experimental physicist. He won the Nobel Prize specifically for magnetic resonance, nuclear magnetic resonance,

the details of which had followed up on Rami. He and Block, who was at Stanford. And when asked at the time, Ed Purcell was asked at the time when he won the Nobel Prize, what the utility of this would be. And he said he didn't necessarily think it would have any wide-scale application. It was a very important phenomenon in physics. But I thought it was I-I. Rabi who discovered it. Well, I, Reby, I mean, nothing is, it's all incremental, right?

So Rabi did a tremendously important work in understanding the importance of magnetic moments in atomic systems, for which, in the spectroscopy of fundamental atomic systems. And so that's what he won the work for. And then the people who'd actually used it for a nuclear magnetic resonance to allow you to do a new kind of spectroscopy, to follow up on the spectroscopy of Rabi, where Purcell and Block and others. But I remember those guys specifically said at the time the Nobel Prize, I remember at least Purcell said he never thought it would have an application. And he and, you know, it's a...

I know the name Purcell. I never met him, but I know that... He was a pity. He was a wonderful man. He actually wrote a great introductory book in electromagnetism, which was one of the best at the time. But he was just a fascinating. Like Singer, and in my opinion, the important thing about that I hope most senior scientists realize is that just conveying your fundamental excitement and imagine an interest is perhaps the best thing you can do for young people. In a way that young people are terrified by important people and people they look up to.

And just being willing to talk to them and convey your excitement is probably the most important thing you can do as a mentor and a teacher. Because I certainly know it for me, that was profoundly that, you know, just having people who would take me seriously enough to convey their excitement was a tremendous motivator. I agree. Yeah. And we're lucky to have such people. But let's, I want, there's a few, I want to jump through because obviously we're going to, we're not going to have time to do everything. I'll even get to your business career, which has been not so bad. But I was fascinated to learn.

I knew you'd done the time at the Institute for Advanced Analysis, and I knew then you had become chair at Stony Brook, and I was interested in that transition. And I did hear you somewhere talking about the story related to Vietnam, that you got basically fired by IDA for protesting the Vietnam War. Is that not true? Well, yes, it's true. Maxwell Taylor, you remember that?

Sure, yeah. He headed not only IDA, but there were various other kinds of units in this Institute for Defense Analysis. And he wrote a cover story in the New York Times about how well we were doing in Vietnam, and we have to stay the course and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought the Vietnam War was the stupidest thing we were ever done. So I wrote a letter to the editor saying not everyone who works for General Taylor agrees with his views. And here are my views.

And so they published a letter. And I thought there might be repercussions, but there weren't any. But then a few months later, a guy came around and he told me he was a stringer for Newsweek magazine. and he was doing a story on people who worked for the Defense Department, which I indirectly did, who were opposed to the war. And he said, I'm having a hard time finding me. Can I interview you? Well, I was 29 years old.

No one had asked that interview me. So I said, sure, you can interview. So he said, well, how are you approaching this? And I said, well, here we're supposed to do at least half our time. on their stuff, but you could do half your time on your stuff. So until the war is over, I'm going to only work on my stuff. And when it's over, I'll only work on their stuff until it evens out. Which was not completely true, but it was kind of true.

And then I went to see my local boss, which was the only intelligent thing I had done that day, and told him I gave this interview. He said, what did you say? I said, well, I said, about half and half and so on. So he says, I got to call Taylor. So he went into his office. He called Taylor. He came out in five minutes and said, you're fired.

Wow. I said, fired. I said, you can't fire me. My title is permanent member. He said, well, do you know the difference between a permanent member and a temporary member? No, I said, he said, a temporary member has a contract. but I wasn't worried at all because I had recently finished the work on minimal varieties and that paper 50 years from then is still cited.

It had almost 1900 citations. And for a math paper, that's a lot. That's a lot, yeah. And so it was really a very good paper. I was very proud of it. And I knew, but I could get an academic job. Yeah. I wasn't worried about supporting my three children.

Now, let me ask you this question. It's a hypothetical one, because that's a great segue, because we'll talk about moving back into academia. And it's nice to have had that security knowing in the background that maybe that, I don't know, that didn't weigh on your decision. Let me just ask the question. Would you have done it again if you'd known the consequences, of what you said, or would you hold back?

Well, that's a good question. I probably would have preferred not to get fired. So in that sense. But as I said, it didn't worry me very much. It didn't worry me very much because I knew I could get a decent academic job. It might not pay as much as IDEA. and I had some office, but then Stonybrook came along and asked if I wanted to chair the department, and that sounded kind of exciting.

Oh, you will get, we'll get there because, again, I can relate, because I did the most exact same thing at almost the exact same age. But before you get there, I read a quote from you, or I heard a quote from you somewhere saying, everyone should be fired once. Yes. Okay. Everyone should have that experience, as long as you don't make a habit of. of it. Okay. That's what I should. Okay, but let me, let's parse that for a second, because I actually

also think it's kind of a useful thing for people to do. And maybe it was just a fun remark, but, but, but I, it can be very useful. So I mean, well, maybe it was just an offhand remark, but I'd ask you to elaborate on that. What, what's the utility about being fired? Because I think there, it's useful to suddenly be in one way or another force to be doing, to do something else, but, well, I don't know. I, uh, I, um, I just blurted that out. Oh, okay. I didn't know if there was more to it than that, and I couldn't.

I couldn't just ask me. But it's a great remark. It's a great remark, yeah. And maybe that's why I heard it. It's a good sound bite. The, you went, you moved to Sony Brook. And how old were you like 40 or? No, 30.

Only 30. Okay, so you're much younger. You know, I moved to become chair of a department. I taught at Yale. And I moved. at that point I was 38, but I moved to become chairman of a department, which was, had had a reasonable history, but was at sort of a low point at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. And the physics department?

Yeah, the physics department. And Yale. No, I was in the physics department at Yale, and then I moved to become, I left that to become chair of a much smaller department in some sense at Case Western Reserve. It's a university in Cleveland. Yeah. And, and, um, it's a good school. It's a good school.

And the department had had a distinguished history. Michelson was its first professor of, or Michelson. And I ended up having that same position he did. But it was invigorating. And people, there were a number of reasons I chose it. I was kind of young and people said, why did you want to move into administration? But I had this opportunity to have 12 new faculty positions to hire,

to build a department, to create something new. And it was very attractive to me. So I wanted to ask you about that, about your experience and what attracted you to be a chair? Because if you're young, people say avoid administration. You know, don't do it. Well, I just thought it would be fun. The pay was pretty good.

And the department was weakish. So I knew there could be improvement. And I just thought it would be fun. And it turned out I was a very good recruiter. I love recruiting. Me too. And you like it. Yeah.

It's really fun to find great people and lure them to your operation. So I did two things in those few years. I started what became turned Simons. But I also, the first year, I hired 10 people. The second year, I hired 10 people. Wow. Had to fire a few who obviously didn't have to. tenure. And we built a very, very good department, especially in differential geometry. But we'd also

hired a guy named Jim Axe, who was, I don't know if you remember that name. Yes. He had won the Cole Prize. He was an algebraist, and he was the most famous guy we had. You hired from Cornell or something? You learned him away from Cornell. He was at Cornell. And I alert him away. from there and but then we hired a lot of very very good people and the department became you know a very good very good department yeah and that's a great that's a very satisfying thing let me let me ask you another personal question I guess because it because it was my experience and I don't know if it was yours when you're a young academic I'm trying to make your way up and of course you sort of left for a while, so maybe this is different.

You're really always thinking about yourself and how to, you know, your own problems, your own academic problems, the things you want to do, the research thing you want to do. And it's not really an altruistic field in that sense. And when I became chair, it was not only a thrill to be able to recruit good people and to recognize talent, which in retrospect is a very satisfying thing to know that you've helped a young person that's talented. But I also found it very surprising how fulfilling it was for me to help other people do what they wanted to do well. And I don't know if you had that experience to be able to find that you're actually helping other people build a career and be

excellent. Is that was, did you find that? Well, I found it more when I went into business. I was going to, I was going to ask that only because I realized that one of the, I'm jumping ahead because I thought maybe that that experience might have primed you, because one of, as far as I can tell, and unlike most of the interviews with you, which I assume are largely about your incredible success as a quant, but is that one of your, one of the reasons you were so successful,

it seems to me, if I, trying to distill this, is being able to bring in really talented people and let them run with their talent. Yes, and let them run. You have to have good taste in selecting people. But then you don't sit on them. You let them do their thing. And that's very satisfying.

And again, when I went into business, that was even more important in a certain sense. And I hired some terrific people. there and let them as you say do your thing did but do you think your experiences chair help prime you for that or not I mean the sense of hiring faculty and saying okay we think you're good now do good things it good I mean I learned how to manage people which is very difficult and something you don't learn as an academic as a rule right and so I left Stony Brook I think after eight years and

And that's when I went into business. And but I had learned to manage people. And, and I was, I was good at that. Well, recognizing talent and encouraging them do the best thing is great at managing people. Yeah. If that's what you can, I mean, sometimes, unfortunately, there's the minutia of other things that get in the way. But that's the heart of a good, yeah.

And it's, and it obviously worked for, you you and you fortunately you actually were able to build look let me let me put this well let me there's as far as I can tell again I've tried to to think about your life having read been studying it lately three factors probably are important but one I learned one was that you you had sold this company that had started way back when in Columbia and so you had a cushion you had a you weren't you had a monetary cushion you weren't quitting your job in some sense with worrying about feeding the family. I did. And in fact, that business was sold and for quite a lot of money. And my friends said from Columbia, okay, now we have all this money.

I didn't know anything about investing, but I said, okay, I'll do that. And I found a guy, a mathematician, who had gone into the commodities business. And I went and talked to him to see what he was doing. And he seemed to really know what he was doing. So I said, okay, we're going to give you X dollars. You can have 10% of the profits. and we want you to make some money for us. And I said, but if you lose too much, you have to stop.

And he said, what's too much? I said, well, if you're down 30%, you have to stop. But as I was walking out the door, I said, and if you make a tremendous amount of money, you have to stop. How much is that? I said, if you multiply the fund, by a factor of 10 after your fees, then you have to stop. Wow.

And well, he couldn't argue with that. Yeah. But the remarkable thing was that after a few steps that he took that didn't work, he got into something and made a fortune. Nine months, nine months later, he had multiplied our money by a factory of 10. Wow. And much of that was in a Bermuda trust that had been set up for me by the father-in-law of one of the two boys because he was very appreciative that I'd gotten this business going in the first place.

He owned half the business, and he took $100,000 and put it in a Bermuda trust for my family. Oh. And so that $100,000 was invested with Charlie, and that became a million. So now I'm saying I'm not alone. So I don't know how we get into that. but no well the the the fact that um that that that well yeah i we got to do it by saying i knew you'd you'd had a little you'd had a cushion financially which would which allow which makes it little easier to switch to to quit academia i think obviously the but the other thing was that you had

um so that was certainly a help there's no doubt about it and and it might have been a harder decision if you were if you were going paycheck to paycheck um But also you also had a cushion of intellectual excellence. You were able to build on the investment you'd made in humanity. As far as I can see, you brought in, let's see, someone you knew, a very important person from the Institute of Defense Analysis who'd been involved in creating a very important algorithm which led to speech recognitions, right? Baum is his name or something? And then also Axe, you're a great hire from...

So you were able to say, oh, I've got these really good people already know they're really good, and I can bring them in. That must have been important. It was important. And we were doing fundamental trading initially, and that worked out okay. Wait a minute. I should go. We had 10 minutes left.

10 minutes or so? Is it? Yeah, 10 or 15 minutes, yeah. Yeah, maybe 15 minutes. Thank you. I don't know where I was. It was fundamental trading, but finally we get into making models, and they worked better, and it was ever since it was model making.

And your experience in algorithms, obviously, algorithms, obviously algorithms, became very important as did machine learning I mean which which were you directly exposed to machine learning or is that something that we're brought in by your colleagues machine learning didn't exist in those days as a notion I think machine learning has only been around for about 10 years or 15 years no we didn't we didn't do machine learning but the idea of of of in some sense sense, in some sense, looking at having a vast storehouse of data that you could analyze and look for patterns.

Yes. What became a central feature, obviously, of what, of what. That's what we did. We had a tremendous amount of data, historical data, tick data even, the tick. We had a ton of that. And the way it worked is a guy would think, oh, well, maybe. this would be a predictive signal and he cook up something and then we could test it back test it for the previous 10 years to see this does this really work and and if it was

statistically significant it would go into the it would go into the business so that's the way that's the way it worked and it's probably still works that way It still works that way. It's called black box, right? And I'm intrigued by that because in some sense, I've done a lot of discussions with people in the past and written about AI. But the idea that basically patterns can be discerned, that you might not discern yourself,

but by looking at data enough, and that's how Tesla can look and find, you know, in principle, hopefully that someone's not a pedestrian, but a stoplight. is that a black box can come up with saying, this is what you should do, but it never tells you why you should do it. Absolutely.

And it's frustrating for people, and I understand early on, it was a natural tendency for you guys not to believe it, to say, look, we have an intuition. Why should we trust this machine telling us to do X when there's no rational reason that we can think of doing it? I didn't worry about that. I didn't.

If it worked, it worked. But we had very, strong conditions requirements yeah the the the the the what you call the the signal versus the this the noise I guess and you know predictive signals and they have to have enough statistical significance to put them into the system. And they're tested all the time.

Sometimes the signal disappears after a while. So you take it out of the system. But, you know, it's just a continuing growing thing. Well, in retrospect, of course, it seems eminently sensible. By the way, I've had three, four of my Ph.D. students, from Yale one year went to work as quants in Wall Street because they you know the mathematics was not that different than what they were doing and the pay was a lot better. But none of them came to renaissance? I you know the interesting question is no I don't think so they were being hired by you know and I don't

know if any of them eventually came to renaissance they were being hired by the big the big management for you know all the big banks and things that were hiring people like crazy. Yeah I know but anyway they You know, the funny thing is I later, I heard, I remember a year after three of them were in Wall Street, they met and they were sitting there and they were at work. And then they ended up talking about gauge theories and then someone said, hold on, hey, wait, wait, that's not what we do anymore. But what I wanted to ask you about is this interesting, it's fascinating that you had the capability to say you didn't worry about whether it defied intuition. because many people, I think, would not be able to do that.

And I was going to ask you a side question. There's no doubt that as machine learning gets better, medical diagnostics will be ultimately rationally taken over, I think, by machine learning, but looking vast amounts of data and making clinical recommendations the basis of it. But the question that's interesting is, will people be willing to take? So if a black box says, do this, but doesn't give you the biochemical reason or the rational reason whether people will be willing to take medical instructions from a black box basically that is a very good question it never occurred to me

and i think uh the medical community it would be very difficult for them to implement some treatment which they didn't understand at all why it should work. Even if it's the best treatment. Yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, for example, acupuncture, some people believe in acupuncture.

But there's no analysis that says, oh, this is why acupuncture should work. We should all do acupuncture. So most people stay away from it, even though it might work. in some cases. I don't know. It might. I haven't seen evidence of it, but I know that people swear by, but then people swear by a lot of things for which there's no evidence.

It's a human characteristic. Okay, well, I thought, I'm glad we got to that question because I think it's an interesting one. I mean, the difference is, I think why it'll be much harder, is that if you're wrong in your algorithm, you lose some money. If you're wrong in your clinical recommendation, you may lose a life, and one seems a little more difficult than the other, I think. Correct. And maybe it's easier to take losing money than the life.

Let me, since we don't have much time, there's a few, there's a few other areas I wanted to hit. And I'll just pick on one of them. You know, I'm a great admirer many things you've done. And not just the math, but the things you've chosen do in your life. And that's how, by the way, we first met, I think, was when I lectured at the World Science Festival probably early on. I remember you and your wife came to a number of the lectures.

We had a number of good talks. We support that organization. Yeah, I know you do. And we've chatted with it. And as I've built other organizations, I've hoping at some point the Simons Foundation would fund that, but that's not the reason we're doing that. The thing I want to talk about is one of the things that Simon's Foundation funds is the Flatiron Institute of Computational Scientists, which of course, in some sense,

I can see why you personally would think that's incredibly important because it's been important in many ways in your own. I am as proud of the Flatiron Institute as I am for anything else I ever did. I'm really proud of it. It's terrific. You know, that answered my question. I was going to ask it. My last question was what you're most proud of. So, well, are you more as proud of that as, as turned Simons or men or or or the minimal.

minimal varieties yeah well i'm pretty proud of that churn simons well yes because i uh came up with its roots the beginning and then with churn of course we expanded it a great deal but uh i thought what i came to him was with was was very good so i'm pretty proud of that well you'll like to be proud of that well you'll like to be proud I mean, you don't have to rank them. I mean, I'm glad to see that the Flatiron Institute up there. But I wanted to ask you a question. It funds, it supports computational biology, computational astrophysics, computational quantum mechanics, computational mathematics. Not quantum mechanics, quantum physics.

Oh, quantum physics, thank you. Computational mathematics and computational neuroscience. Correct. If you had, okay, just let me ask. There's no reason. This is just a guess, speculative. Which of those areas do you think is going to pay off the most? And we'll do another interview in 50 years and see.

Well, they're all paying off. I can't really tell. The astrophysics unit has published the most papers, but that's not necessarily a measure. Yeah. That was run by David Spurgel. Who's now the head of the foundation? The head of the foundation.

Who I've written papers with, by the way. Yes? Yeah, when I was at junior fellow, he was a graduate student at Harvard. I see. Well, so I don't know which unit is going to pay off the most, but they interact with each other and in particular computational mathematics, which was relatively a new unit, is great because it's like glue. They help all the other units.

Some of the postdocs there are joint with quantum physics or astrophic or something. So that's headed by Leslie Greenguard, whom you've undoubtedly heard of. And he started the thing. It was called Skada, Simon Center for Data Analysis. and that was worked out so well. It was tilted to the biological side because Leslie also has an MD. But it really went well.

And then we thought, well, maybe we'll start astrophysics. And Spurgel gave a workshop, organized a workshop to see if it was a good idea. to do this astrophysics that that would been the second unit which you and i took them aside after the thing it said i'll do this if you had it and uh he said oh i got to think about that and so on but after a couple of months he agreed to head it and uh did a great job and that we have we have great leadership in each of the units absolutely stupendously leadership. That's important. It's totally important. And so we have good and with good taste. So there's very many good people there. Well, I think that's, you have many skills, but one of which has clearly been

knowing, talent and and nurturing it, which I think has been obviously very important for you in every area of your career. Look, I know you have to go. I have one last question because I don't want to keep you. Actually, I would love to talk for another hour or two, but I've really enjoyed this. I hope you have. But speaking of the support of the Flatiron Institute and the Simon's Foundation, there is now a trend in some sense to almost return to the Renaissance times of patrons. As governments cut back and are in support of research because of economic concerns or demands, one is finding more and more extremely wealthy individuals like yourself and you know Uri Milner in supporting some things and and others that they're getting almost a time of patrons again

where it seems to be that the opportunities for supporting especially foundational research is now coming directly from individuals of great wealth and not from the government which was really only fairly recent government supporter research has only been since the second world war in the united states the big science i'm wondering what your take is on that and its future and is it a good thing or a bad thing look it can't be a bad thing for someone uh to uh patronize science that can't be bad it can't be bad i agree but uh i think it's really important that the government does more. Schumer has a bill that would boost science considerably. We'll see if bill passes. But I think it's great that there are patrons science.

In fact, we have as an organization called the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which is consist of people who would like to support China philanthropists. So I think that's great. But I also think that the government ought to do more. And Chinese are doing much more. Yeah, one is seeing much more in China and Asia, you know, when we're seeing it in Singapore and in Korea.

And that was a great concern, of course, watching the United States having its support of fundamental research decreasing. And the only bad, I agree with you, it can't be bad. The only bad thing could be if governments say, oh, look, they're doing it. Now we don't have to do it. And that would be, that would be the, yes, the bad thing. There would be a bad thing. But we're, yeah. And so one, we are, that is the message I want to give is that we shouldn't, we shouldn't use this. We should benefit from it and the demonstration. And I think if anything, use it as a demonstration that, that individuals like yourself can spur really important.

results with merely a few billion dollars spent at the time. And it used to be a billion dollars. There was a lot of money. But but but but but but and so governments can do a lot with very little. But we have all benefited from your career as a scientist as a mathematician and intellectual scientists and and and then as a as a supporter of science and not just I say this not just as a scientist, but someone whose whole being has been been built around trying to improve

people's understanding of science and the scientific enterprise. And so I particularly appreciate what you've done. And so it's been a great, it's always been, the times we've talked, it's been a pleasure, but this has been a real thrill for me. And I really thank you for the time you've taken. I enjoy it. I enjoyed it. You're a good questioner and a very interesting guy yourself.

You've done a lot of interesting things, I'm sure. Well, I hope, thanks a lot. And I hope we have a chance to do this maybe once again. again online and I certainly hope to do it offline, maybe next time I'm in New York. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose

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