Jim Simons, billionaire hedge fund founder, dies at 86

Jim Simons, the billionaire investor, mathematician and philanthropist, died on Friday in New York City, according to his foundation, the Simons Foundation. Simons was 86 years old.

Jim Simons, the billionaire investor, mathematician and philanthropist, died on Friday in New York City, according to his foundation, the Simons Foundation. Simons was 86 years old. Simons, the founder of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, helped to pioneer quantitative investing, a market strategy that relies on mathematical and statistical models to identify investing opportunities. Later in life, Simons became a political donor and philanthropist. Simons had a love for math and numbers from an early age, according to his foundation’s website. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1938, Simons earned a mathematics degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in math from the University of California, Berkeley. “Mathematics was the only subject I liked,” Simons said in a 2015 interview for the Numberphile podcast. After a brief stint teaching at MIT and Harvard University, Simons joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey, working as a code breaker for the National Security Agency. According to his foundation, Simons was fired from the institute in 1968 due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. Simons then joined the faculty at Stony Brook University as the head of the school’s mathematics department.