James Harris Simons is a mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist from the United States. He is the creator of Renaissance Technologies, an East Setauket, New York-based quantitative hedge fund. He and his fund are renowned as quantitative investors, employing mathematical models and algorithms to profit from market inefficiencies.
Simons is well-known for his pattern recognition research. He invented the Chern-Simons form and helped to advance string theory by offering a theoretical framework for combining geometry and topology with quantum field theory. Simons and his wife established the Simons Foundation in 1994 to encourage research in mathematics and fundamental sciences.
Jim Simons Wiki/Bio:
| Real Name: | James Harris Simons |
| Nick Name: | Jim, Quant King |
| Date of Birth: | 25 April 1938 |
| Birthplace: | Newton, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Religion: | Christianity |
| Profession: | Mathematician, Hedge Fund Manager, Philanthropist |
| Marital Status: | Married |
Jim Simons Education:
At the age of 23, he got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Bertram Kostant.
Jim Simons Career:
Simons’ mathematical work has mostly focused on manifold geometry and topology. His 1962 Berkeley Doctorate thesis, directed by Bertram Kostant, provided a novel demonstration of Berger’s categorization of Riemannian manifold holonomy groups. He then began working on the notion of characteristic classes alongside Shing-Shen Chern.
Simons collaborated with the National Security Agency to break codes in 1964. He was on the research team of the IDA’s Communications Research Division and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University between 1964 and 1968. He was the chairman of the math department at Stony Brook University from 1968 to 1978.
Simons founded Math for America, a non-profit organisation, in January 2004 with the goal of improving mathematics teaching in public schools across the United States by recruiting more highly qualified teachers.
For more than two decades, Simons’ Renaissance Technologies hedge funds have used mathematical models to assess and execute deals, many of which are automated. Renaissance forecasts price fluctuations in financial instruments using computer-based models.
Renaissance uses non-financial expertise such as mathematicians, physicists, signal processing experts, and statisticians.
The International Association of Financial Engineers honoured Simons Financial Engineer of the Year in 2006. Simons announced on October 10, 2009, that he will retire on January 1, 2010, but would remain at Renaissance as non-executive chairman.
According to Forbes magazine, Simons’ net worth in 2017 was $18 billion, ranking him #24 on the Forbes 400 richest people list. Forbes rated him 23rd in 2018 and his net worth was projected to be $21.6 billion in October 2019. Forbes named him one of the top hedge fund managers and traders in March 2019.
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Jim Simons Book:
Gregory Zuckerman’s book The Man Who Solved the Market: How James Simons Started the Quant Revolution, on Simons and his investment strategies, was published on November 5, 2019. In 2018, Trinity College Dublin awarded an honorary doctorate to him.
Jim Simons Controversies:
According to The Wall Street Journal, Simons was questioned by investors in May 2009 about Renaissance Technologies’ portfolios’ huge performance disparity.
On July 22, 2014, the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a bipartisan condemnation of Simons for using sophisticated basket options to disguise day-to-day trading as long-term financial gains.
An article published in The New York Times in 2015 indicated that Simons was involved in one of the greatest tax battles of the year, with Renaissance Technologies being “under examination by the IRS over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over approximately a decade.
Jim Simons Awards:
In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha’s Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame.
The Financial Times named him “the world’s smartest billionaire” in 2006. In 2007, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 2011, he was named to Bloomberg Markets Magazine’s list of the 50 Most Influential People.
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Jim Simons Personal Life:
| Barbara Bluestein (Married – 1959, Divorce – 1974) Marilyn Hawrys |