Just Jim

James Harris Simons just passed away—he preferred Jim so we will use that here. I know that there will be here articles, posts, and special places to read about his wonderful life and work. So I thought I might add something that will be a bit different. I hope he would have liked this if he was still around.

Here is a quote of his that I like quite a bit:

I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.

One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup’s stock. The attractiveness, of course, is that you can make more money successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet.

IDA and More

I interacted with people who interacted much more closely with Jim that I ever did.

In 1964, Jim worked with the National Security Agency to break codes. Between 1964 and 1968, he was on the research staff of the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis (CRD of IDA). After being forced to leave IDA due to his public opposition to the Vietnam War, he worked on other problems. He founded Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund. It eventually made huge returns so Jim was described as the “greatest investor on Wall Street”, and more specifically “the most successful hedge fund manager of all time”.

But I had no connection to Renaissance Technologies. But I did have a connection to him via IDA. Some of our friends in CS theory such as

Don Coppersmith
Donald Knuth
Nick Patterson
J. Barkley Rosser

also consulted at IDA in Princeton. When I was first at Princeton I was asked to join IDA—this was helped by Bob Sedgewick who had also had just joined Princeton. Bob had already been working as a consultant with IDA. Bob was terrific since while he was a theorist he definitely could write real programs.

This led me to get to meet Lee Neuwirth then the director. He was really a great leader: Neuwirth was the Deputy Director at IDA/CRD during the anti-war, anti-IDA demonstrations at Princeton, later serving as Director for eight years. He worked at IDA until his retirement in 1999. He is the recipient of the Exceptional Career Service Award from the National Security Agency. Nick Patterson later served also as the Director after he initially worked for the British code-breaking agency here.

Neuwirth wrote a book on his personal times at IDA. This is a bit challenging since the work done there was—well I cannot say much about it.

Open Problems

I hope this added some to the tidal wave of articles on Jim. I thought a bit about saying I knew that hedge fund group solved P=NP but thought I might get in trouble making that claim. Oh well perhaps they did?