Jim Simons
Zierler:
And Jim, when you were a kid, how did you or your teachers or your parents first recognize the abilities that you had?
Simons:
Well, all parents think their kids are a genius, so (laughs) so, but I did get involved with math very early. I loved to keep multiplying by two and see… I finally got up to whatever it is, 1,024, I guess? And so I liked to do that. I remember I was in the car with my father when I was maybe four or five at the most, and he said he had to stop to get gas, and I said, “Why do you have to do that?” And he said, “Well, we could run out of gas if I don’t stop.” And I said to myself and then to him, “Well, you don’t have to run out of gas. You can use half of what you have, and then you can use half of that and then half of that, and you’ll never run out of gas.” (both laugh) Well, it didn’t occur to me that you’d never get anywhere either, but I just kept slicing up what was in the gas tank. And I remember also spending many a night lying in bed thinking, “How do you define the expression, “Pass it on.” That’s an expression, right? Pass it on. How do you define it? How do you explain to someone that he’s supposed to say to someone, the next guy down, et cetera, that wasn’t good enough. I really wanted to figure it out. And one night, I did figure it out, and then when I woke up, I forgot what it was. So (both laugh) but now I remember. But it’s, you know, a strange thing for a kid to do as, I was maybe eight, to think about such a question. So I always liked math.
Here’s my source for that. Jim Simons, smoker, figured out a way to turn the markets into a money machine, suffered severe tragedies, gave money to science. (Why are so many brilliants from Brookline? Irish Jewish interaction under the looming mountains of Boston?)
