The Simons Foundation is Jim Simons' baby, originally conceived to fund research in mathematics (Mr. Simons' specialty), the foundation has expanded its areas of interest to all basic science.
They put out a magazine called Quanta which we last visited in "Data Driven: The New Big Science: Chapter 4 Biology in the Era of Big Data".
Mr. Simons was the premier global macro quant with his Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund averaging 35% per annum (after fees, which are a post unto themselves) since 1989.
Mr. Simons retired in 2009.
In 2013 RenTech was up 18%, trailing the S&P by 12 points but stomping on the average hedge fund's 7.4% return.
All that being said, it is actually Marilyn Simons who is the motive force.
From Quanta Magazine:
Early in cosmic history, our universe may have bumped into another — a primordial clash that could have left traces in the Big Bang’s afterglow.
Like many of her colleagues, Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, once largely dismissed the notion that our universe might be only one of many in a vast multiverse. It was scientifically intriguing, she thought, but also fundamentally untestable. She preferred to focus her research on more concrete questions, like how galaxies evolve.Some of our links to Quanta:
Then one summer at the Aspen Center for Physics, Peiris found herself chatting with the Perimeter Institute’s Matt Johnson, who mentioned his interest in developing tools to study the idea. He suggested that they collaborate.
At first, Peiris was skeptical. “I think as an observer that any theory, however interesting and elegant, is seriously lacking if it doesn’t have testable consequences,” she said. But Johnson convinced her that there might be a way to test the concept. If the universe that we inhabit had long ago collided with another universe, the crash would have left an imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint afterglow from the Big Bang. And if physicists could detect such a signature, it would provide a window into the multiverse.
Erick Weinberg, a physicist at Columbia University, explains this multiverse by comparing it to a boiling cauldron, with the bubbles representing individual universes — isolated pockets of space-time. As the pot boils, the bubbles expand and sometimes collide. A similar process may have occurred in the first moments of the cosmos.
In the years since their initial meeting, Peiris and Johnson have studied how a collision with another universe in the earliest moments of time would have sent something similar to a shock wave across our universe. They think they may be able to find evidence of such a collision in data from the Planck space telescope, which maps the CMB....MUCH MORE
"At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law"
Making A Better Model of the Market: Are Financial Markets an Aspect of the Quantum World?
"The Thermodynamic Theory of Ecology"
