Jim Simons Tribute Event Honors His Lifelong Support for Math and Science

One of Jim Simons’ favorite places was the front row of the Simons Foundation’s Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium. Sitting in his customary seat, he would listen as some of the world’s leading thinkers shared the latest advances in our understanding of the universe. Even when he would occasionally doze off during a talk, he would always be ready at the end with a perceptive question.

“Jim loved being at the frontiers,” said Simons Foundation Chair Marilyn Simons, who co-founded the philanthropy with Jim Simons in 1994. “This is what Jim was about, pursuing fundamental knowledge.”

Over his life, Jim Simons gave away billions of dollars to math and science research and education. When he died on May 10, 2024, he left an indelible legacy of supporting fundamental research and a profound void in math and science philanthropy. On June 27, 2025, leaders in mathematics, science and philanthropy gathered in the Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium to honor Jim Simons’ life and legacy and to inspire continued philanthropic support of math and science.

The event included six lectures by preeminent researchers on the latest developments in their fields — from biomedicine and neuroscience to artificial intelligence and physics — and a panel discussion of the importance of philanthropic funding in basic research.

“I know Jim would love to be here today,” said Marilyn Simons at the event. “He would be asking the most questions, probably, of anybody in the room.”

The event highlighted the impact of the Simons Foundation on scientific funding, not just in terms of dollars given, but also in its focus on high-risk, high-reward projects that foster collaboration — a philosophy Jim Simons championed.

“One of the best ways to honor him and honor his legacy is to continue to do and support superb science, because that’s what he wanted to do,” said Simons Foundation President David Spergel.

Cori Bargmann, a Simons Foundation trustee and a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York City, drew early inspiration from the foundation when asked by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to start a philanthropy in science nearly a decade ago. During the formative stages of what became the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, she and her operations manager visited the Simons Foundation.

“We just copied what Jim and Marilyn did. We looked for big ideas, we listened to the experts and the smartest people we could find. We tried to do things that other people thought were too ambitious or that were too new. And we brought together people from experimental science and medicine and from computational fields, kind of bringing the math and the biology together.”

Philanthropic support of research often plays an outsized role in enabling discoveries, said Azrieli Foundation Chair and CEO Naomi Azrieli. “There’s a real built-in risk aversion, as I think we all know, in public funding cycles and the way selections are carried out. I think philanthropy has [a] great opportunity to just turn that on its head and fund high-risk, high-reward, [and] sometimes crazy, outlandish ideas,” she said. “Philanthropy has a particular approach that would favor higher risk and higher potential.”

“As challenged as we feel right now in academia and in the nonprofit sector, I think we have incredibly important roles to play,” said Jennifer Doudna, a pioneering biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley who shared the Nobel Prize in 2020 for research on CRISPR gene-editing technology. “We’ve got to figure it out because nobody else is going to play it.”

“Generous philanthropic support, such as could come from the Simons Foundation and other places, can make a big difference to U.S. labs,” said geneticist David Emil Reich of Harvard Medical School.

Jim Simons’s approach to science philanthropy was rooted in his prodigious career as a mathematician, which included the co-discovery of Chern-Simons invariants with mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern and work on soap bubble surfaces. “I heard about Jim Simons as a mathematician before knowing about all that he had done for mathematics as a supporter,” said mathematician Alessio Figalli, director of the Institute for Mathematical Research at ETH Zurich.

As Jim Simons’ work unexpectedly opened the doors to new areas of physics, Simons experienced firsthand how fundamental research drives discoveries. “That’s the power of abstract mathematics,” Figalli said.

Many of the event’s speakers spoke on how Jim Simons’ passion, curiosity and kindness helped establish the Simons Foundation as an epicenter for discovery. “Jim was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “He continues to have a really profound impact on fundamental science. But apart from all of that, it was just truly a joy to interact with him and just plain fun, and he has certainly been tremendously missed in that spirit.”

“Many people love science, but few understand it deeply, and even fewer spend a lifetime using that understanding to change the world for the better,” wrote New York Senator Chuck Schumer in a message read at the event. “Jim was one of those rare few. Very few people in the long history of America have done more to promote science and to get the federal government more involved in science than Jim.”

Jim Simons’s influence will likely reverberate through the worlds of math and science for decades to come, said computer scientist Jennifer Chayes of the University of California, Berkeley. “We should all ask ourselves, ‘What would Jim have done?’ Because I ask myself that all the time, I ask, ‘What would Jim have done?’”

Recordings of the scientific talks given at the event are available below and on YouTube.