A visit to a scientific-research center usually begins at a star
professor’s laboratory that is abuzz with a dozen postdocs collaborating
on various experiments. But when I recently toured the Flatiron
Institute, which formally opened in September, in lower Manhattan, I was
taken straight to a computer room. The only sound came from a
susurrating climate-control system. I was surrounded by rows of black
metal cages outfitted, from floor to ceiling, with black metal shelves
filled with black server nodes: boxes with small, twinkling lights and
protruding multicolored wires. Tags dangled from some of the wires,
notes that the tech staff had written to themselves. I realized that I’d
seen a facility like this only in movies. Nick Carriero, one of the
directors of what the institute calls its “scientific-computing core,”
walked me around the space. He pointed to a cage with empty shelves.
“We’re waiting for the quantum-physics people to start showing up,” he
said. The Flatiron Institute,
which is in an eleven-story fin-de-siècle building on the corner of
Twenty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, is devoted exclusively to
computational science—the development and application of algorithms to
analyze enormous caches of scientific data. In recent decades,
university researchers have become adept at collecting digital
information: trillions of base pairs from sequenced human genomes; light
measurements from billions of stars. But, because few of these
scientists are professional coders, they have often analyzed their hauls
with jury-rigged code that has been farmed out to graduate students.
The institute’s aim is to help provide top researchers across the
scientific spectrum with bespoke algorithms that can detect even the
faintest tune in the digital cacophony.
I first visited the
Flatiron Institute in June. Although the official opening was still a
few months away, the lobby was complete. It had that old-but-new look of
expensively renovated interiors; every scratch in the building’s
history had been polished away. Near the entrance hangs a Chagall-like
painting, “Eve and the Creation of the Universe,” by Aviva Green.
Green’s son happened to be spending the year at the institute, as a
fellow in astrophysics. “Every day, he walks into the lobby and sees his
mother’s picture,” Jim Simons, the institute’s founder, told me.
Simons,
a noted mathematician, is also the founder of Renaissance Technologies,
one of the world’s largest hedge funds. His income last year was $1.6
billion, the highest in the hedge-fund industry. You might assume that
he had to show up every day at Renaissance in order to make that kind of
money, but Simons, who is seventy-nine, retired eight years ago from
the firm, which he started in the late seventies. His Brobdingnagian
compensation is a result of a substantial stake in the company. He told
me that, although he has little to do with Renaissance’s day-to-day
activities, he occasionally offers ideas. He said, “I gave them one
three months ago”—a suggestion for simplifying the historical data
behind one of the firm’s trading algorithms. Beyond saying that it
didn’t work, he wouldn’t discuss the details—Renaissance’s methods are
proprietary and secret—but he did share with me the key to his investing
success: he “never overrode the model.” Once he settled on what should
happen, he held tight until it did.
The Flatiron Institute can be
seen as replicating the structure that Simons established at
Renaissance, where he hired researchers to analyze large amounts of data
about stocks and other financial instruments, in order to detect
previously unseen patterns in their fluctuations. These discoveries gave
Simons a conclusive edge. At the Flatiron, a nonprofit enterprise, the
goal is to apply Renaissance’s analytical strategies to projects
dedicated to expanding knowledge and helping humanity. The institute has
three active divisions—computational biology, computational astronomy,
and computational quantum physics—and has plans to add a fourth.
Simons
works out of a top-floor corner office across the street from the
institute, in a building occupied by its administrative parent, the
Simons Foundation. We sat down to talk there, in front of a huge
painting of a lynx that has killed a hare—a metaphor, I assumed, for his
approach to the markets. I was mistaken, Simons said: he liked it, and
his wife, Marilyn, did not, so he had removed it from their mansion in
East Setauket, on Long Island. (Marilyn, who has a Ph.D. in economics,
runs the business side of the foundation, and the institute, from two
floors below.) An Archimedes screw that he enjoyed fiddling with sat on a
table next to a half-filled ashtray. Simons smokes constantly, even in
enclosed conference rooms. He pointed out that, whatever the potential
fine for doing so is, he can pay it.
Simons has an air of being
both pleased with himself and ready to be pleased by others. He dresses
in expensive cabana wear: delicate cotton shirts paired with chinos that
are hiked high and held up by an Indian-bead belt. He grew up in the
suburbs of Boston, and speaks with the same light Massachusetts accent
as Michael Bloomberg,
with frequent pauses and imprecisions. He sometimes uses the words “et
cetera” instead of finishing a thought, perhaps because he is
abstracted, or because he has learned that the intricacies of his mind
are not always interesting to others, or because, when you are as rich
as Simons, people always wait for you to finish what you are saying.
On
a wall, Simons had hung a framed slide from a presentation on the
Chern-Simons theory. He helped develop the theory when he was in his
early thirties, in collaboration with the famed mathematician
Shiing-Shen Chern. The theory captures the subtle properties of
three-dimensional spaces—for example, the shape that is left if you cut
out a complicated knot. It became a building block of string theory,
quantum computing, and condensed-matter physics. “I have to point out,
none of these applications ever occurred to me,” he told me. “I do the
math, they do the physics.”
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