CHAPTER ONE

Jimmy Simons grabbed a broom and headed upstairs.

It was the winter of 1952 and the fourteen-year-old was trying to earn some spending money at Breck's garden supply near his home in Newton, Massachusetts, the leafy Boston suburb. It wasn't going well. Working in a stockroom downstairs, the young man found himself so lost in thought that he had misplaced the sheep manure, planting seeds, and most everything else.

Frustrated, the owners asked Jimmy to walk the store's narrow aisles and sweep its hardwood floors, a mindless and repetitive task. To Jimmy, the demotion felt like a stroke of luck. Finally, he was left alone to ponder what mattered most in his life. Math. Girls. The future.

They're paying me to think!

Weeks later, his Christmas-time job complete, the couple who owned the store asked Jimmy about his long-term plans.

“I want to study mathematics at MIT.”

They burst out laughing. A young man so absentminded that he couldn't keep track of basic gardening supplies hoped to be a math major—at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no less?

“They thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard,”Simons recalls.

The skepticism didn't bother Jimmy, not even the giggles. The teenager was filled with preternatural confidence and an unusual determination to accomplish something special, the result of supportive parents who had experienced both high hopes and deep regrets in their own lives.

Marcia and Matthew Simons welcomed James Harris to the family in the spring of 1938. She and Matty poured time and energy into their son, who remained their only child after Marcia suffered a series of subsequent miscarriages. A sharp intellect with an outgoing personality and subtle wit, Marcia volunteered in Jimmy's school but never had the opportunity to work outside the home. She funneled her dreams and passions into Jimmy, pushing him academically and assuring him that success was ahead.

“She was ambitious for me,”Simons recalls.“She saw me as her project.”

Matty Simons had a different perspective on both life and parenting. From the age of six, Matty, one of ten children, hustled to make money for the family, selling newspapers in the streets and hauling bags for travelers at a nearby train station. When he reached high school age, Matty began working full time. He tried going to night school but quit, too tired to concentrate.

As a father, Matty was kind, soft-spoken, and easygoing. He enjoyed coming home and spinning tall tales for Marcia, telling her about Cuba's imminent plans to build a bridge to Florida, for example, as Jimmy did his best to mask a grin. Marcia might have been the family's intellect, but she also was remarkably gullible. Matty would concoct increasingly outrageous stories until Marcia finally picked up on the fibs, a family game guaranteed to crack Jimmy up.

“She didn't usually get it,”Simons says,“but I did.”

Matty worked as a sales manager for 20th Century Fox, driving to theaters around New England to pitch the studio's latest films. Shirley Temple, the era's biggest star, was under contract to Fox, so Matty cobbled her films with four or five others and convinced theaters to pay for the package. Matty enjoyed his job and was promoted to sales manager, sparking hopes that he might rise in the corporate ranks. Matty's plans changed when his father-in-law, Peter Kantor, asked him to work at his shoe factory. Peter promised an ownership stake, and Matty felt obligated to join the family business.

Peter's factory, which produced upscale women's shoes, was a success, but money flew out almost as fast as it came in. A heavyset, flamboyant man who favored expensive clothing, drove a succession of late-model Cadillacs, and wore elevator shoes to compensate for his five-foot-four stature, Peter blew much of his wealth on horse races and a series of paramours. On paydays, Peter let Jimmy and his cousin Richard Lourie hold piles of cash“as high as our heads,”Richard recalls.“We both loved it.” ¹

Peter projected a certain insouciance and a love of life, attitudes Jimmy later would adopt. A native of Russia, Peter shared naughty stories about the old country—most of which featured wolves, women, caviar, and a lot of vodka—and he taught his grandsons a few key Russian phrases—“Give me a cigarette”and“Kiss my ass”—sending the boys into fits of laughter. Peter placed the bulk of his cash in a safe-deposit box, likely to shield it from taxes, but he made sure to have $1,500 in his breast pocket at all times. He was found with that exact amount the day he died, surrounded by Christmas cards from dozens of appreciative female friends.

Matty Simons spent years as the general manager of the shoe factory, but he never received the ownership share Peter had promised. Later in life, Matty told his son he wished he hadn't forgone a promising and exciting career to do what was expected of him.

“The lesson was: Do what you like in life, not what you feel you ‘should’ do,”Simons says.“It's something I never forgot.”

What Jimmy liked to do more than anything else was think, often about mathematics. He was preoccupied with numbers, shapes, and slopes. At the age of three, Jimmy doubled numbers and divided them in half, figuring out all the powers of 2 up to 1,024 before becoming bored. One day, while taking the family to the beach, Matty stopped for gasoline, perplexing the young boy. The way Jimmy reasoned, the family's automobile could never have run out of gas. After it used half its tank, there would be another half remaining, then they could use half of that, and so on, without ever reaching empty.

The four-year-old had stumbled onto a classic mathematical problem involving a high degree of logic. If one must always travel half the remaining distance before reaching one's destination, and any distance, no matter how small, can be halved, how can one ever reach one's destination? The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea was the first to address the dilemma, the most famous of a group of paradoxes that challenged mathematicians for centuries.

Like many children without siblings, Jimmy sat with his thoughts for long stretches of time and even talked to himself. In nursery school, he would climb a nearby tree, sit on a branch, and ponder. Sometimes Marcia had to come and force him to climb down and play with the other children.

Unlike his parents, Jimmy was determined to focus on his own passions. When he was eight, Dr. Kaplan, the Simons family's doctor, suggested a career in medicine, saying it was the ideal profession“for a bright Jewish boy.”

Jimmy bristled.

“I want to be a mathematician or a scientist,”he replied.

The doctor tried to reason with the boy.“Listen, you can't make any money in mathematics.”

Jimmy said he wanted to try. He didn't quite understand what mathematicians did, but it likely involved numbers, which seemed good enough. Anyway, he knew perfectly well he didn't want to be a doctor.

In school, Jimmy was smart and mischievous, displaying his mother's self-assurance and his father's impish humor. He loved books, frequently visiting a local library to take out four a week, many well above his grade level. Mathematical concepts captivated him most, however. At the Lawrence School in Brookline, which counts television newscasters Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters as alumni, Jimmy was elected class president and finished close to the top of his grade, losing out in the latter case to a young woman who didn't find herself lost in thought nearly as often as he did.

During that time, Jimmy had a friend who was quite wealthy, and he was struck by the comfortable lifestyle his family enjoyed.

“It's nice to be very rich. I observed that,”Simons later said.“I had no interest in business, which is not to say I had no interest in money.” ²

Adventures occupied much of Jimmy's time. Sometimes he and a friend, Jim Harpel, rode trolleys to Bailey's Ice Cream in Boston to enjoy a pint. When they were older, the pair sneaked into burlesque shows at the Old Howard Theatre. One Saturday morning, as the boys headed out the door, Harpel's father noticed binoculars around their necks.

“You boys going to the Old Howard?”he asked.

Busted.

“How'd you know, Mr. Harpel?”Jimmy asked.

“Not much bird watching around here,”Mr. Harpel replied.

After ninth grade, the Simons family moved from Brookline to Newton, where Jimmy attended Newton High School, an elite public school well equipped to nurture his emerging passions. As a sophomore, Jimmy enjoyed debating theoretical concepts, including the notion that two-dimensional surfaces could extend forever.

After graduating high school in three years, Simons, thin and solidly built, set off on a cross-country drive with Harpel. Everywhere they went, the seventeen-year-olds—middle-class and, until then, largely sheltered from hardship—conversed with locals. Crossing into Mississippi, they saw African Americans working as sharecroppers and living in chicken coops.

“Reconstruction had left them as tenant farmers, but it was the same as slavery,”Harpel recalls.“It was a bit of a shock to us.”

Camping in a state park, the boys visited a swimming pool but saw no African Americans, which surprised them. Simons asked a heavyset, middle-aged park employee why no one of color was around.

“We don't allow no n——s,”he said.

Visiting other cities, Simons and Harpel saw families living in abject poverty, experiences that left a mark on the boys, making them more sensitive to the plight of society's disadvantaged.

Simons enrolled at MIT, as he had hoped, and even skipped the first year of mathematics thanks to advanced-placement courses he took in high school. College brought immediate challenges, however. Early on, Simons dealt with stress and intense stomach pain, losing twenty pounds and spending two weeks in the hospital. Doctors eventually diagnosed colitis and prescribed steroids to stabilize his health.

Overconfident during the second semester of his freshman year, Simons registered for a graduate course in abstract algebra. It was an outright disaster. Simons was unable to keep up with his classmates and couldn't understand the point of the assignments and course topics.

Simons bought a book on the subject and took it home for the summer, reading and thinking for hours at a time. Finally, it clicked. Simons aced subsequent algebra classes. Though he received a D in an upper-level calculus course in his sophomore year, the professor allowed him to enroll in the next level's class, which discussed Stokes' theorem, a generalization of Isaac Newton's fundamental theorem of calculus that relates line integrals to surface integrals in three dimensions. The young man was fascinated—a theorem involving calculus, algebra, and geometry seemed to produce simple, unexpected harmony. Simons did so well in the class that students came to him seeking help.

“I just blossomed,”Simons says.“It was a glorious feeling.”

The way that powerful theorems and formulas could unlock truths and unify distinct areas in math and geometry captured Simons.

“It was the elegance of it all, the concepts were beautiful,”he says.

When Simons studied with students like Barry Mazur—who graduated in two years and later would win top mathematics awards and teach at Harvard University—Simons concluded he wasn't quite at their level. He was close, though. And Simons realized he had a unique approach, mulling problems until he arrived at original solutions. Friends sometimes noticed him lying down, eyes closed, for hours at a time. He was a ponderer with imagination and“good taste,”or the instinct to attack the kinds of problems that might lead to true breakthroughs.

“I realized I might not be spectacular or the best, but I could do something good. I just had that confidence,”he says.

One day, Simons saw two of his professors, renowned mathematicians Warren Ambrose and Isadore Singer, in deep discussion after midnight at a local café. Simons decided he wanted that kind of life—cigarettes, coffee, and math at all hours.

“It was like an epiphany ... a flash of light,”he says.

Away from mathematics, Simons did everything he could to avoid courses demanding too much of him. MIT students were required to enroll in a physical-fitness course, but Simons didn't want to waste time showering and changing, so he signed up for archery. He and another student, Jimmy Mayer, who had come to MIT from Colombia, decided to make the class a bit more interesting, betting a nickel on every shot. They became fast friends, wooing girls and playing poker with classmates into the night.

“If you lost five dollars, you practically shot yourself,”Mayer recalls.

Simons was funny, friendly, spoke his mind, and often got into trouble. As a freshman, he enjoyed filling water pistols with lighter fluid and then using a cigarette lighter to create a homemade flame thrower. Once, after Simons created a bathroom bonfire in Baker House, a dormitory on Charles River, he flushed a pint of lighter fluid down a toilet and closed the door behind him. Glancing back, Simons saw an orange glow around the door frame—the inside of the bathroom was aflame.

“Don't go in there!”he screamed to approaching classmates.

Inside the toilet, the fluid had heated up and ignited into a fireball. Luckily, the dorm was built with dark red rustic bricks and the fire failed to spread. Simons confessed to his crime and paid the school fifty dollars total in ten-week installments for the necessary repairs.

By 1958, after three years at MIT, Simons had enough credits to graduate at the age of twenty, earning a bachelor of science in mathematics. Before entering graduate school, though, he yearned for a new adventure. Simons told a friend, Joe Rosenshein, that he wanted to do something that would“go down in the records”and would be“historic.”

Simons thought a long-distance roller-skating trip might attract attention but it seemed too tiring. Inviting a news crew to follow him and his friends on a water-skiing trip to South America was another possibility, but the logistics proved daunting. Hanging out in Harvard Square with Rosenshein one afternoon, Simons saw a Vespa motor scooter race by.

“I wonder if we could use one of those?”Simons asked.

He developed a plan to undertake a“newsworthy”trip, convincing two local dealerships to give him and his friends discounts on Lambretta scooters, the top brand at the time, in exchange for the right to film their trip. Simons, Rosenshein, and Mayer set out for South America, a trip they nicknamed“Buenos Aires or Bust.”The young men drove west through Illinois before heading south to Mexico. They traveled on country roads and slept on porches, in abandoned police stations, and in forests, where they set up jungle hammocks with mosquito netting. A family in Mexico City warned the boys about bandits and insisted they buy a gun for protection, teaching the young men to say a crucial phrase in Spanish:“If you move, we'll kill you.”

Driving with a noisy, broken muffler through a small southern Mexican town around dinnertime, wearing leather jackets and looking like the motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando's classic film The Wild One, the boys stopped to find a place to eat. When the locals saw visitors disturbing their traditional evening stroll, they turned furious.

“Gringo, what are you doing here?”someone called out.

Within minutes, fifty hostile young men, some holding machetes, surrounded Simons and his friends, pushing their backs up against a wall. Rosenshein reached for the gun but remembered it only had six bullets, not nearly enough to handle the swelling crowd. Suddenly, police officers emerged, pushing through the throng to arrest the MIT students for disturbing the peace.

The boys were thrown in jail. Soon, it was surrounded by a mob, which screamed and whistled at them, causing such commotion that the mayor sent someone to investigate. When the mayor heard that three college kids from Boston were causing trouble, he had them brought directly to his office. It turned out that the mayor had graduated from Harvard University and was eager to hear the latest news from Cambridge. Moments after fending off an angry mob, the boys sat down with local officials for a sumptuous, late-night dinner. Simons and his friends made sure to get out of town before dawn, though, to avoid additional trouble.

Rosenshein had enough of the drama and headed home, but Simons and Mayer pushed on, making it to Bogotá in seven weeks, through Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, overcoming mudslides and raging rivers along the way. They arrived with almost no food or money, thrilled to stay in the luxurious home of another classmate, Edmundo Esquenazi, a native of the city. Friends and family lined up to meet the visitors, and they spent the rest of the summer playing croquet and relaxing with their hosts.

When Simons returned to MIT to begin his graduate studies, his advisor suggested he finish his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, so he could work with a professor named Shiing-Shen Chern, a former math prodigy from China and a leading differential geometer and topologist. Simons had some unfinished business to take care of, though. He had begun dating a pretty, petite, dark-haired eighteen-year-old named Barbara Bluestein, who was in her first year at nearby Wellesley College. After four consecutive nights of intense conversation, they were enamored and engaged.

“We talked and talked and talked,”Barbara recalls.“He was going to Berkeley, and I wanted to join him.”

Barbara's parents were furious about the quicksilver relationship. Barbara was too young to wed, her mother insisted. She also worried about a potential power imbalance between Barbara and her self-assured fiancé.

“Years later, he's going to wipe the floor with you,”she warned Barbara.

Determined to marry Simons despite her parents' objections, Barbara negotiated a compromise—she'd go with him to Berkeley, but they'd wait until her sophomore year to wed.

Simons received a fellowship to study in Berkeley. Arriving on campus in the late summer of 1959, he got an early and unhappy surprise—Chern was nowhere to be found. The professor had just left for a year-long sabbatical. Simons began working with other mathematicians, including Bertram Kostant, but he met frustrations. One night, in early October, Simons visited Barbara's boardinghouse and told her his research wasn't going well. She thought he looked depressed.

“Let's get married,”she recalls telling him.

Simons was on board. They decided to go to Reno, Nevada, where they wouldn't have to wait days for a blood test, as was required in California. The young couple had almost no money, so Simons's roommate lent him enough to purchase two bus tickets for the two-hundred-mile trip. In Reno, Barbara persuaded the manager of a local bank to let her cash an out-of-state check so they could buy a marriage license. After a brief ceremony, Simons used the remaining money to play poker, winning enough to buy his new bride a black bathing suit.

Back in Berkeley, the couple hoped to keep their wedding a secret, at least until they figured out how to break the news to their families. When Barbara's father wrote a letter saying he was planning a visit, they realized they'd have to own up. Simons and his new bride wrote to their respective parents, filling several pages with mundane news about school and classes, before adding identical postscripts:

“By the way, we got married.”

After Barbara's parents cooled down, her father arranged for a local rabbi to marry the couple in a more traditional ceremony. The newlyweds rented an apartment on Parker Street, near a campus buzzing with political activity, and Simons made progress on a PhD dissertation focused on differential geometry—the study of curved, multidimensional spaces using methods from calculus, topology, and linear algebra. Simons also spent time on a new passion: trading. The couple had received $5,000 as a wedding gift, and Simons was eager to multiply the cash. He did a bit of research and drove to a Merrill Lynch brokerage office in nearby San Francisco, where he bought shares of United Fruit Company, which sold tropical fruit, and Celanese Corporation, a chemical company.

The shares barely budged in price, frustrating Simons.

“This is kind of boring,”he told the broker.“Do you have anything more exciting?”

“You should look at soybeans,”he said.

Simons knew nothing about commodities or how to trade futures (financial contracts promising the delivery of commodities or other investments at a fixed price at a future date), but he became an eager student. At the time, soybeans sold for $2.50 per bushel. When the broker said Merrill Lynch's analysts expected prices to go to three dollars or even higher, Simons's eyes widened. He bought two futures contracts, watched soybeans soar, and scored several thousand dollars of profits in a matter of days.

Simons was hooked.

“I was fascinated by the action and the possibility I could make money short-term,”he says.

An older friend urged Simons to sell his holdings and pocket his profits, warning that commodity prices are volatile. Simons disregarded the advice. Sure enough, soybean prices tumbled, and Simons barely broke even. The roller-coaster ride might have discouraged some novice investors, but it only whet Simons's appetite. He began getting up early to drive to San Francisco so he could be at Merrill Lynch's offices by 7:30 a.m., in time for the opening of trading in Chicago. For hours, he would stand and watch prices flash by on a big board, making trades while trying to keep up with the action. Even after heading home to resume his studies, Simons kept an eye on the markets.

“It was kind of a rush,”Simons recalls.

It became too much, though. Schlepping into San Francisco at the crack of dawn while trying to complete a challenging thesis proved taxing. When Barbara became pregnant, there were too many balls for Simons to juggle. Reluctantly, he put a stop to his trading, but a seed had been planted.

For his doctoral thesis, Simons wanted to develop a proof for a difficult, outstanding problem in the field, but Kostant doubted he could pull it off. World-class mathematicians had tried and failed, Kostant told him. Don't waste your time. The skepticism seemed only to spur Simons. His resulting thesis,“On the Transitivity of Holonomy Systems,”completed in 1962 after just two years of work, dealt with the geometry of multidimensional curved spaces. (When Simons speaks to novices, he likes to define holonomy as“parallel transport of tangent vectors around closed curves in multiple-dimensional curved spaces.”Really.) A respected journal accepted the thesis for publication, helping Simons win a prestigious three-year teaching position at MIT.

Even as he made plans with Barbara to return to Cambridge with their baby, Elizabeth, Simons began to question his future. The next few decades seemed laid out for him all too neatly: research, teaching, more research, and still more teaching. Simons loved mathematics, but he also needed new adventure. He seemed to thrive on overcoming odds and defying skepticism, and he didn't see obstacles on the horizon. At just twenty-three, Simons was experiencing an existential crisis.

“Is this it? Am I going to do this my whole life?”he asked Barbara one day at home.“There has to be more.”

After a year at MIT, Simons's restlessness got the better of him. He returned to Bogotá to see if he could start a business with his Colombian schoolmates, Esquenazi and Mayer. Recalling the pristine asphalt tile in his MIT dormitory, Esquenazi complained about the poor quality of floor material in Bogotá. Simons said he knew someone who made flooring, so they decided to start a local factory to produce vinyl floor tile and PVC piping. The financing mostly came from Esquenazi's father-in-law, Victor Shaio, but Simons and his father also took small stakes.

The business seemed in good hands, and Simons didn't feel he had much to contribute, so he returned to academia, accepting a research position at Harvard University in 1963. There, he taught two classes, including an advanced graduate course on partial differential equations, an area within geometry he anticipated would become important. Simons didn't know much about partial differential equations (PDEs), but he figured teaching the course was a good way to learn. Simons told his students he was learning the topic just a week or so before they were, a confession they found amusing.

Simons was a popular professor with an informal, enthusiastic style. He cracked jokes and rarely wore a jacket or tie, the outfit of choice among many faculty members. His jovial exterior masked mounting pressures, however. Simons's research was going slowly, and he didn't enjoy the Harvard community. He had borrowed money to invest in the floor-tile factory Esquenazi and the others were building, and he had persuaded his parents to mortgage their home for their own share of the deal. To pad his income, Simons began teaching two additional courses at nearby Cambridge Junior College, work that added to his stress, though he kept it secret from his friends and family.

Simons was hustling for money, but it wasn't simply to pay off his debts. He hungered for true wealth. Simons liked to buy nice things, but he wasn't extravagant. Nor did he feel pressure from Barbara, who still sometimes wore items of clothing from her high school days. Other motivations seemed to be driving Simons. Friends and others suspected he wanted to have some kind of impact on the world. Simons saw how wealth can grant independence and influence.

“Jim understood at an early age that money is power,”Barbara says.“He didn't want people to have power over him.”

As he sat in a Harvard library, his earlier career doubts resurfaced. Simons wondered if another kind of job might bring more fulfillment and excitement—and perhaps some wealth, at least enough to pay off his debts.

The mounting pressures finally got to Simons. He decided to make a break. LB8Yd2spLYXqxQrFfl7wHugb24wGEDZgxiQy/pRVAnLPT1WOSKVv7tBU7GM8V+tX