Jim Simons, Math Genius Who Conquered Wall Street, Dies at 86
Summary
Jim Simons, the prizewinning mathematician who abandoned a stellar academic career, then plunged into finance — a world he knew nothing about — and became one of the most successful Wall Street investors ever, died on Friday in his home in Manhattan. So at age 40 he opened a storefront office in a Long Island strip mall and set about proving that trading commodities, currencies, stocks and bonds could be nearly as predictable as calculus and partial differential equations. Mr. Simons equipped his colleagues with advanced computers to process torrents of data filtered through mathematical models, and turned the four investment funds in his new firm, Renaissance Technologies, into virtual money printing machines. Then, in 1978, he abandoned his scholarly career and founded Monemetrics, an investment company with offices in a small shopping mall in Setauket, just east of Stony Brook on the North Shore of Long Island. Every conceivable type of data — news reports of political unrest in Africa, bank statistics from small Asian nations, the rising price of potatoes in Peru — was fed into advanced computers to glean patterns that enabled Renaissance to score consistently huge annual returns.