James Harris “Jim” Simons (born 1938) is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is known as a quantitative investor and in 1982 founded Renaissance Technologies, a private hedge fund based in New York City. Although Simons retired from the fund in 2009, he remains its non-executive chairman and adviser.
He is also known for his studies on pattern recognition for which he developed (with Shiing-Shen Chern) the Chern–Simons form, and contributed to the development of string theory by providing a theoretical framework to combine geometry and topology with quantum field theory. Simons was a mathematics professor and subsequent chair of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University.
As a consequence of his investment career, Forbes Magazine estimated Simons’ net worth is to be US$18 billion as of February 2017.
In 2016, asteroid 6618 Jimsimons, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1936, was named after Simons by the International Astronomical Union in honor of his numerous contributions to mathematics and philanthropy.
Early life and education
James Harris Simons was born to a Jewish family, the only child of Marcia (née Kantor) and Matthew Simons, and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father owned a shoe factory.
He received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and a Ph.D., also in mathematics, from the University of California, Berkeley, under supervision of Bertram Kostant in 1961, at the age of 23.
Net Worth details: Jim Simons has made most of his money through Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion fund, which he has collected at least $9.5 billion from over the years. He owns about $1.4 billion of the $9 billion the fund manages. Simons has been credited with owning nearly 25 percent of the company, valued at about $2.8 billion total. He founded the New York based hedge fund and Medallion has returned an average of over 40 percent since 1988.
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