James Harris Simons
James "Jim" Harris Simons ( born 1938 in Newton, Massachusetts) is an American mathematician, billionaire and hedge fund manager.
Life
Simons is the son of a Jewish shoe factory owner in Newton (Massachusetts ). He studied at MIT (Bachelor 1958), where he was in 1961 Moore Instructor ( and to cooperate with Isadore Singer began ), and in 1962 received his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley with Bertram Kostant ( On the transitivity of holonomy systems). 1961 to 1964 he taught at Harvard University and was then until 1968, scientists at the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses ( IDA) ( under the direction of Maxwell D. Taylor ) for which he cracked codes during the Vietnam War. He was chairman of the mathematics department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1968, where he took among others James Ax.
Simon is known for his work on minimal surfaces and for the Chern - Simons forms, which he introduced with Shiing - Shen Chern in 1974 and the applications eg in string theory, knot theory and topological quantum field theory have ( Chern - Simons theory).
In 1976, he won the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry from the American Mathematical Society.
In 1978, he turned away from mathematics and went into the financial industry, in which he had a leading role in the application of advanced mathematical methods and has. In 1982 he founded Renaissance Technologies Operations, a hedge fund in New York, with its flagship Medallion Fund, in which he also a society of James Ax merged in 1988, and its chairman, he is still. He heard about the years of the most successful hedge funds with assets of at times over $ 10 billion. In 2005 he founded for institutional investors Renaissance Institutional Equity Fund. 2006 Simons was led by Forbes Magazine as # 57 in the list of the richest Americans.
In 2006, he was a financial engineer of the year, the IAFE (International Association of Financial Engineers).
He donates for mathematical research (eg MSRI ) and autism research ( where his foundation donated mainly in research since 2007, over $ 200 million ). His daughter is autistic. Except for the MSRI, he is a trustee at the Rockefeller University, the Institute for Advanced Study ( which he donated a large sum for Biological Research ) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory ( 2006, he and several others escaped with $ 13 million the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider before closure ). In memory of two deceased sons in accidents, it supports a nature park at Stony Brook ( Avalon Park ) and the health system in Nepal. February 2008, he donated $ 60 million for the newly established Science Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook. His Simons Foundation supports research in mathematics and theoretical physics among others, through grants such as the Simons Fellowships.
Simons was married twice. From his first marriage he has three, second two children.