Quanta Magazine, "the Greatest Thing to Happen to Science Journalism in Years", and the Simons Foundation

About the talk

I am very excited that Tom agreed to join us for an interview because Quanta Magazine has been on my radar for years. Tom is not a scientist; he is a journalist with a background in science. My conversation with Tom will be non-technical, covering the standards which he had to follow when working with the New York Times and the role he played as editor of Quanta Magazine — how Tom chose subjects for Quanta and how he ensured the quality and veracity of the contributors.

Tom will tell us about the history of the Simons Foundation and Jim Simons, who founded the Foundation. Jim passed away recently. He was an internationally known mathematician who became a hedge fund manager with a personal net worth of about $30 billion. He used his personal funds for the Foundation, which supports both Perimeter Institute and Fields Institute research, among many other projects.

About the speaker

From 2005 to 2012, Tom worked for the New York Times as digital editor, where he managed the online science and national news sections, co-founded and edited the Scientist at Work blog, created the Profiles in Science video series, produced the Science Times podcast, and wrote about science, tennis and technology. He then moved to the Simons Foundation, where he founded Quanta — a Pulitzer Prize-winning, editorially independent science and math magazine — serving as its first editor-in-chief from 2012 to 2024. While at Quanta he edited two books, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire and The Prime Number Conspiracy, published by The MIT Press. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Gross called Quanta “the greatest thing to happen to science journalism in many years.”