Mum: Tiger-Mum tendencies, smart, gullible. Dad: non-academic, vocational.
Young Jimmy independently arrived at Zeno’s Paradox, and concluded that the family car should never need gas.
Simons was not exceptional among his colleagues. But he could mull problems until he arrived at original solutions.
The gateway drug for Simons was soybeans futures that had couple grand of profits, but the prices tumbled and Simons barely broke even.
Simons explaining holonomy to a novice: the parallel transport of tangent vectors around closed curves in multiple-dimensional curved spaces.
Not everyone’s like you, Simons. Makes me wonder how working at RenTech is. Is it like a rich math department with no pesky undergrads?
Reminds me of an anecdote a friend told me about intern interviews for one of the big banks. Something like, if you keep moving half the distance, how many moves do you need to make in order to touch some object? The expected answer was impossible, but I didn’t buy it. Zeno was being taken out of context. Touching something doesn’t mean zero distance between your hand and the thing. Close enough to get the touch sensation fired up is all we need. Unless we’re talking nuclear reactors, get that Zeno logic outta here.