James Harris Simons

James Harris Simons was born to Jewish parents Marcia and Matthew Simons in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1938. His father owned a shoe factory.

He developed an early interest in exploring nature and was also inclined towards mathematics from a young age.

He got a vacation job in the stockroom of a garden supply store when he was 14. But he was so forgetful that his supervisors demoted him to floor sweeper. He told his supervisors that he planned to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when asked about his future plans, much to the supervisors’ amusement.

In 1955, Simons was accepted into the prestigious MIT where he studied mathematics and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1958. He thoroughly enjoyed his time at MIT and there was no doubt in his mind that he was meant to be a mathematician.

He went on to pursue his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. There he worked under the supervision of Bertram Kostant and gave a new and more conceptual proof of Berger's classification of the holonomy groups of Riemannian manifolds. He completed his doctorate in 1961, at the age of 23.

After receiving his Ph.D. he embarked on an academic career. He then joined the research staff of the Communications Research Division for the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in Princeton as a code breaker in 1964. Simons enjoyed this post very much as he was naturally skilled at coming up with algorithms to attack particular types of cryptographic problems.

His time at the IDA proved to be a profound learning experience for him. The knowledge he gained there regarding the utilization of mathematical models to interpret data would greatly aid him in establishing his business in future.

Between 1964 and 1968 he also taught mathematics at MIT and Harvard University. Ultimately he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University and was appointed chairman of the math department in 1968.

At the Stony Brook University, he worked with mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern to develop the Chern-Simons invariants which are geometric measurements that are important not only in mathematics, but are also useful in both quantum field theory and condensed matter physics.

James Simons had always been interested in finance and during the 1970s he seriously started thinking about establishing his own business in the field. In 1978, he quit academia and founded a hedge fund management firm called Monemetrics.

James Simons founded the hedge fund management Renaissance Technologies which is today one of the world's most successful hedge fund companies. The company, which trades in markets around the world, uses computer-based mathematical models to predict price changes in financial instruments and utilizes financial signal processing techniques such as pattern recognition which set it apart from its competitors.