Billionaire Jims Simons Closes Age At 86, The Mathematical Expert Who Takes Wall Street

James Simons (Photo: Reuters)

JAKARTA - Investor and billionaire James Simons passed away at the age of 86 on May 10, 2024. He is also a leading hedge fund mathematician and founder of the world's Renaissance Technologies.

Jims Simons, his nickname, has a net worth of approximately US$31 billion or Rp.497 trillion (Rp. 16,046 per US dollar) according to Forbes.

With this wealth, the man who was born on April 25, 1938, is known to be a philanthropist who has contributed billions of US dollars during his life to support medical research and science, education and Democratic Party candidates.

AQR Capital Management's manager and founder said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had mentioned James Simons as a great and good person and even rarely happened to anyone else.

As a mathematician, Simons is used to working on a large collection of data and finding a comfortable pattern to guide buying and selling.

He founded Renaissance in 1978 in East Setauket, New York, 70 miles east of Wall Street. He quickly created a new way to invest, laying the basis for quantitative trade that has been applied by many companies in recent years.

"We employ physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and computer scientists and they usually don't know anything about finance," Simons said at a conference in New York in 2007.

"We haven't recruited Wall Street at all," he added.

On Wall Street, Simons is respected and also a little feared. Renaissance, whose Medallion Fund provides an average annual refund of more than 60 percent over three decades, became one of the most successful hedge funds in the world under the leadership of Simons.

He retired as CEO in 2010 and resigned as chairman in 2021.

Simons kept his company a secret about making money. He is described as someone who views the market as a code that must be broken, wrote Wall Street Journal writer Gregory Zucker in his 2019 book, "The Man Who Solved the Market".

The Medallion trading system relies on co-operating purchases and sales to generate high-risk gains across asset classes, in such a way that patterns usually remain hidden for other traders.

In 1994, Simons and his wife, Marilyn, founded the Simons Foundation, which supports scientists and organizations around the world in advancing research in basic mathematics and sciences.

He left behind a wife, three children, five grandchildren, and a great-grandson.

"I did a lot of math. I made a lot of money, and I donated almost everything," Simons said at the 2022 event in honor of the Abel Prize winners who were selected for their mathematical achievements.