Already a subscriber?Jim Simons, the mathematician-investor who created what many in finance consider the world’s greatest moneymaking machine at his secretive firm, Renaissance Technologies, has died. He was 86.He was worth an estimated $US31.8 billion , making him the 49th-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He was worth an estimated $US31.8 billion , making him the 49th-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He played the benevolent father figure, organising company trips to Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, Florida and Vermont — and encouraged employees to bring their families.Company lore is that on one of the firm’s ski trips, Simons, a lifetime smoker, bought an insurance policy for a local restaurant so he wouldn’t have to forgo his beloved Merits.
Around 2020, Renaissance expanded the group of directors who would eventually succeed Simons in overseeing the firm and promoted his son, Nathaniel Simons, to co-chairman, a move positioning him to eventually take over.James Harris Simons was born on April 25, 1938, in the Boston suburb of Brookline, the only child of Matthew Simons and the former Marcia Kantor. His father worked in the film industry as a New England sales representative for 20th Century Fox.
The work introduced Simons to the possibilities in creating algorithms for computers. IDA employees were permitted to spend half their time on personal work, and Simons devoted some of his to predicting short-term moves in the stock market.Simons worked there for more than three years before losing his job for publicly challenging the IDA’s president, Army General Maxwell D. Taylor, over the war in Vietnam., Taylor had insisted that the US was winning a war worth fighting.