It's funny to think how different the equivalent would have been when I came here. Probably a lot more about the web (and open source) than about AI and cryptocurrency. That was, I guess, a full generation ago now!

Interesting read. I don't think this came up in my stats classes:

> Gosset solved many problems at the brewery with his new technique. The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research. Although Gosset pioneered industrial quality control and contributed loads of other ideas to quantitative research, most textbooks still call his great achievement the “Student’s t-test.”

Will be interesting to see how this affects math research. He has pumped unthinkable amounts of money into the field. The only first-class flights I've taken in my life were to get to Simons-funded conferences at super fancy hotels. (I found these conferences a bit ridiculous, but the luxury treatment did ensure that they could get together a lot of the biggest names in the field in one place.)

Besides the conferences, there is the SCGP at Stony Brook, the Simons Center in Manhattan, whatever MSRI is called now, AMS-Simons travel grants, tons of money for the arXiv, the Magma license deal... and that's just the stuff that I've benefited from personally. I know there's more, Simons Collaboration grants and probably other things I've never heard of. He was very good to us all.

We've always joked that Phds in geometry-adjacent fields have to have one of the highest average incomes of any degree, probably at least $1 million a year. Simons making $3 billion, the rest of us making 90k apiece.