Programs

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing is the world’s leading venue for collaborative research in theoretical computer science.

The program is intended to support established institutes or centers in the mathematics and physical sciences through funding to help strengthen contacts within the international scientific community.

Africa Mathematics Project is designed to nurture and accelerate high-level mathematics research in Africa.

Through a matching grant for endowment, the Math+X program creates joint Chairs, each shared equally between a mathematics department and a partner department. The grants include substantial operating funds to support activities shared between the two departments.

The Simons Observatory will join the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Simons Array in the high Atacama Desert in Chile to make observations of the cosmic microwave background and study how the universe began, what it is made of, and how it evolved to its current state.

Following completion of observations with POLARBEAR-1, two more 3.5 meter diameter Huan Tran Telescopes will be deployed at UCSD's James Ax Observatory. This project, known as the "Simons Array", will include more than 20,000 "POLARBEAR-2 style detectors, cooled nearly to absolute zero. The Simons Array will provide an unmatched combination of mapping speed, frequency, and sky coverage.

The National Science Foundation Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (NSF/MPS) and for Biological Sciences (NSF/BIO) and the Simons Foundation Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (SF/MPS) shall jointly sponsor a new research institute to facilitate collaborations among groups of mathematicians (including statisticians and computational scientists) and biologists.

The NSF-Simons Research Centers for Mathematics of Complex Biological Systems (MathBioSys) initiative created innovative, collaborative research centers at the intersection of mathematics and molecular, cellular and organismal biology, establishing new connections between mathematical sciences and biological sciences and promoting interdisciplinary education and workforce training.

The NSF-Simons Research Collaborations on the MoDL initiative awarded two collaborations designed to support research activities focused on a particular set of topics involving some of the most challenging questions in the general area of mathematical and scientific foundations of deep learning.

Magma is a Computer Algebra system developed by the Computational Algebra Group at the University of Sydney, with many collaborators around the world. It specializes in areas of mathematics that make heavy use of algebraic ideas and techniques. The costs of its development are mainly covered by research grants. However, the cost of the software infrastructure is covered by a levy on all users. This levy also covers the cost of building binaries for all the popular platforms and the provision of basic support and a bug fixing service for the user community. The Simons Foundation has negotiated to buy a site license that would cover all academic and non-profit research users in the U.S (excluding certain government laboratories).

Cornell University Library has received a five-year funding commitment of $350,000 per year from the Simons Foundation to secure the sustainability of arXiv during 2013-2017. Combined with Cornell’s annual commitment, the foundation’s five-year grant will provide a strong financial basis for the arXiv operation and build trust in the durability of a community-supported business model. The grant will encourage long-term community support by lowering arXiv membership fees, making participation affordable to a broad range of institutions. Most importantly, the participation of Simons Foundation in ensuring arXiv’s future will underscore the importance of the scholarly communication forum for the scientific community.

Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences bring together groups of outstanding scientists to address topics of fundamental scientific importance in which significant new developments have created novel areas for exploration in the fields of mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer science.

The NSF-Simons Research Collaborations on the MoDL initiative awarded two collaborations designed to support research activities focused on a particular set of topics involving some of the most challenging questions in the general area of mathematical and scientific foundations of deep learning.

Each Simons Symposia series brings together mathematicians, theoretical physicists and/or theoretical computer scientists to interact and collaborate in a series of up to three symposia, held every second year and focusing on one topic or a tightly connected group of topics.