짐 사이먼스 인생과 수학 이야기: 천재의 비밀을 밝히다!

well the short talk is this I did a lot of math I made a lot of money and I gave almost all of it away that's the story of my life now it's a good story but it's short so when I was a little boy I uh I liked math in the sense that I like to when I was three or four or something like that double the numbers to 4 8 16 32 episode Etc I got up to a thousand and twenty four and I said enough of that but uh but I I like doubling numbers and uh when I was a little boy also I was in my father's my father was driving me and he said he has to go to a gas station and get gasoline I said why do you need to get gasoline he says well a car needs gasoline I said but you shouldn't need to have to get gasoline you could just use half of what you now have and then half of that and half of that and half of that and you'll never run out of gas without what's called Zeno's Paradox but uh because it didn't occur to me that we wouldn't get very far either but uh there there it was but I did always always like math and uh I went to MIT and uh I took a graduate course right in my freshman year which uh was puzzling to me it was abstract algebra but during this summer I figured it all out I got a book I figured it all out and and then took a lot of math courses at MIT um and uh well the field that I really liked was called differential geometry how many of you have ever heard of differential geometry okay the old folks know about different geometry well differential geometry is a study of curved spaces in in many dimensions with typically with a metric on it so you can see how far apart any two points would would be and uh I really like that field and well um I went to Berkeley I forgot my well I I graduated MIT in three years so I stayed as a graduate student for a year and then they told me you should go to Berkeley and I said why why should I go to Berkeley they said well the great man in your field differential geometry a man named chern is just going to Berkeley and you should work under churn so I said okay so I went out to Berkeley regrettably uh churn was taking a sabbatical leave that year and so he wasn't there so I worked with someone else and that that worked out fine uh it was interesting uh working with this guy I came up with a little theorem and I showed it to him and he said oh that's a nice little theorem it puts in mind an open question which I won't really describe to you but uh but don't work on that question I said why he said because it's too tough this this one worked on it and tried and that one worked on it and tried well of course that just sort of got me going and uh I said okay but I I'm going to work in this problem and uh well uh I did and I solved the problem and I was very pleased with myself and uh went back to teach at MIT and Harvard but for reasons which I won't go into I uh I needed money and I had borrowed money to invest in a company with some friends of mine and I need needed to pay it back but there was a place in Princeton called The Institute for defense analyzes which was a highly classified place under the Aegis of the government the defense department and what we're supposed to do is uh break Russian codes well that was an interesting challenge uh I like the work they told us you could do your own mathematics up to half your time the other half you had to do you know this cold cracking business and well uh during that period I was very interested in an area of mathematics called minimal surfaces does any of you know what a minimal surface is well someone must know what a minimal surface is okay so a minimal surface is a surface of minimal area with respect to its boundary so imagine taking a wire frame just a closed frame dip it in so in in so soap suds and then take it out and there'll be a film that is bounded by this thing and that film that soap film has less an area than any other surface with that boundary so that's a minimal that's a minimal surface and uh the first Fields Prize winner uh back in maybe 1905 had proved that any such boundary would have a minimal surface just one and it would be smooth it wouldn't have any points or anything like that it would just be a nice smooth surface and as I said he won the fields medal for that and um so I got interested in that area while I was there at uh at The Institute for defense analyzes so in my spare time which was quite a lot I worked on that problem because in higher dimensions it was an open was an open problem someone had done it in one dimension higher uh so that would be uh a a three-dimensional surface with a two-dimensional boundary in four-dimensional space and uh well uh but that's where it stopped so I worked in that problem in higher dimensions and was uh lucky enough to solve the problem through ambient Dimension seven but in dimension eight my proof didn't work and uh and I constructed what I thought was a counter example a counter example was something that uh you you you think you have a you've proved the theorem but someone comes along with an example that shows you didn't prove that theorem because this is a counter example so uh I found what I thought was a counter example I couldn't prove it but a couple years and I the paper got published it was was a pretty good paper actually and um but a few years later a couple of mathematicians one of whom was named bombieri and uh showed that my counter example was really a counter example so that killed the problem altogether well uh at a certain point I came to Stony Brook University I was 30 years old to be the chair of their math department which was not a very strong Department and I was pretty young to be the chairman but I thought it would be fun and I had a lot of money to work with because the governor at the time was a guy named Rockefeller now I think everyone has probably heard of the name Rockefeller but has anyone not heard of the name Rockefeller okay most of you have heard of Rockefeller Rockefeller love the State University and was pouring money on it so I had a lot of money to work with and uh hired some terrific people so high as I'm terrific people but at the same time in that time frame I started to get interested in another area of math and uh I worked on that area and came up with something really quite beautiful three dimensions it was a function I can't really describe it but it it lived in three dimensions closed three-dimensional spaces and I was quite pleased I showed it to churn I I say I showed it I we I centered by the mail because her nose days there was no email and chern said well you've done this in three dimensions but it should work in all dimensions I was very dubious but I said okay let's work together and see and he was right it would work in all dimensions and I was very pleased we published the paper and about five years later a physicist named Whitten saw this paper and thought and he was right it could apply to physics and then some other physicists saw how it could apply to physics I didn't know any physics at all churn might have known something but it never occurred to him that would apply to physics and remarkably so you never know where something will go you think you're doing math and you're actually doing physics maybe or whatever so today that is called churn Simon's Theory it's all over the place in physics on average every day four papers in physics reference this churn Simon's Theory so I can't take any credit for it at all but but there it was and of course I'm quite pleased about it but I can't say that oh I I invented this for physics well shortly after that I started to get interested in the world of Investments I had come into a very small amount of money but it was enough to start investing and one thing led to another I started hiring people and we made what was called a hedge fund and it was remarkably successful it's still going I'm not with it anymore but I made a tremendous amount of money from this from this hedge fund now my lovely wife Marilyn said let's give some of it away so I said okay fine so we gave some charity and then she said well why don't we start a foundation and uh okay starting Foundation she started a foundation I put money into it the good thing about putting money into a foundation is you can give the money away you've got the tax advantage but it doesn't have to be spent immediately so you can put money into the foundation and say well we'll see what we want to do with it tomorrow or next year or whatever but it grew and grew and grew so uh it today oh well we decided to focus on science with our uh Foundation focus on science uh ninety percent of it should be science 8 60 of that should be basic science and 30 of that could be translational science and 10 could be education and Outreach and things like that so today uh that Foundation is extremely large and uh so most of the money that I made was put into the foundation so I'm not so rich as I was before but uh Rich enough and we had this wonderful Foundation and uh running it most of the time was my wonderful wife any questions no questions yeah Yuri is in the foundation he just talked uh that's a very good question I could go into that but it's a long story so so I won't any other questions okay good luck to all of you [Applause]