Jim Simons was a groundbreaking investor who used complex statistical models to become wealthy, then later turned towards philanthropy and gave away billions.
- Died: May 10, 2024 (Who else died on May 10?)
- Details of death: Died in New York at the age of 86.
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Jim Simons’ legacy
Numbers were always Jim Simons’ area of expertise. He graduated from MIT with a degree in mathematics, then got a PhD from Berkeley in the same field. In the 1960s, he worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) as a codebreaker. He also taught at MIT and Harvard during this period before leading the math department at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.
Simons eventually realized his work in pattern recognition might prove beneficial for investing. In 1978, he founded Monemetrics, at first mainly trading currencies, then four years later, renamed his firm to Renaissance Technologies. With a focus on science and numbers rather than business savvy, he and his team developed techniques to identify strong investments. This approach, called quantitative analysis, worked. His private Medallion Fund proved hugely profitable. Simons became a billionaire many times over, with a net worth of over $30 billion, at times being ranked in the top 25 richest people in the world.
As he made money, Simons turned billions of it toward philanthropy through the Simons Foundation, created in 1994, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), Math for America, and other charitable endeavors. He gave away an estimated $4 billion during his life.
Simons is in the Institutional Investors Alpha’s Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame. His life and work was chronicled in “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution” by Gregory Zuckerman.
On how he developed his means of measuring investments:
“I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models — just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm — you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn’t it work? And so on.”— TEDTalks interview, 2025
Tributes to Jim Simons
Full obituary: The New York Times
