The mathematician, quant finance pioneer and philanthropist, Jim Simons has died at the age of 86.
James Harris Simons was born on April 25th, 1938, in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Brookline. Studying at MIT he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT and later received his PhD in mathematics from Berkeley in 1961 aged 23.
Simons worked as a code breaker for the National Security Agency in 1964, later with the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis and taught mathematics at MIT and Harvard. His views on the Vietnam war led him to be forced to leave the IDA and he moved to Stony Brook University where he served as chair of the math department.
Simons created Monemetrics in 1978, a hedge fund management firm. Initially Simons did not use advanced mathematics in his work in finance, but later realised the important role that mathematical models could play in fund management. He changed the firm’s name to Renaissance Technologies LLC in 1982.
Simons began to hire academics with a non-finance background, emphasising computer science, physics and mathematics. Using a mixture of data warehousing the company was able to access the statistical probabilities of the price directions of securities.
The Medallion fund is regarded as having the best track record on Wall Street with an average of 66% returns before fees from 1988 to 2018. In 1993 the fund became an internal fund for employees only and ran alongside two other funds for external investors. In 2006 the Financial Times called Simons, “the world’s smartest billionaire” in the “Alternative Rich List” and in 2008 he was inducted into the Alpha’s Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame. Bloomberg Markets included Simons in the “50 Most Influential” in 2011.
Simons retired in 2009, taking up the role of non-executive chair of Renaissance Technologies, which he then stepped down from in 2019. With his wife Marilyn, Simons created the Simons Foundation in 1994 with the aim of supporting projects in health, education and science.
The story of Simons’ life was documented by author Gregory Zuckerberg in the
book, “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.”
Jim Simons is survived by his wife, Marilyn, their three children, and five grandchildren.
Image: Jim Simons by Glueschk, from the Wikipedia Media Library used under the Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/