Jim Simmonsa mathematics professor turned hedge fund founder who was a pioneer Investing using automated quantitative models He used his wealth to become one of the most prominent philanthropists in America. He died on Friday at the age of 86 at his home in Manhattan.announced its founding.
Simons was a mathematics genius who chaired the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, but he left that career to try his luck in the markets in 1978, when he was 40 years old. Hedge fund foundations Renaissance techniques In 1982 and created his Medal box In 1988, he became known for beating the broader market and any investors who tried to compete with him, and also for keeping a keen eye on the secrets of how he did it.
Renaissance headquarters is located in East Setauket, New York, 70 miles east of the city, near the shore of Long Island Sound. It has long appreciated its distance from typical Wall Street traders, and instead employs some of the world’s brightest mathematical minds. for him Spartan website Notes that 90 of its 300 employees have PhDs in mathematics, physics, computer science or related fields..
Al Nahda now manages about $50 billion in assetsFor decades, its Medallion Fund was open only to Simmons and company employees. The Medallion Fund charges a 4% management fee and a performance fee of 36% to 44%, which is much more than any other major hedge fund, but it’s worth it. After fees, the fund has generated a net annual return of more than 30% since inception. By comparison, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway posted compound annual gains of just 20%.
This record was made by Simmons The 51st richest person in the world at the time of his deathWith a wealth estimated at $31.4 billion. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 2004 with a net worth of $2.5 billion.
Simmons was extremely secretive and the details of the investment strategy that fueled his success remained largely mysterious. His last public appearance was in September 2023 11th Annual Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit in New York. He and his wife, Marilyn Simmons, received the award Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy They talked about their charitable work with the editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine. Manit Ahuja. Jim credited Marilyn as the initial driving force behind the Simons Foundation, which she founded in 1994. “I just won the money and gave it to Marilyn.”he joked on stage.
This may have been true when they started making charitable donations. But in his later years Simmons became more personally committed to his philanthropy. He stopped leading Renaissance in 2010, and he and Marilyn have donated more than $6 billion through their foundation, making them… The sixth largest charitable donor in the United StatesAccording to Forbes. The Simons Foundation, which had $4.9 billion in assets at the time of its last available tax return, primarily supports education and research in mathematics and science.
“The entire economy increasingly relies on quantitative skills and we are lagging behind in teaching them.”, Simons said. To Forbes In 2016.
Last year, the Simmons family pledged $500 million over seven years to Stony Brook University the The second largest donation ever to a public university. Simons became head of the mathematics department there at the age of 30 after working as a professor at Harvard and MIT and becoming famous for his work in topology and understanding the properties of complex geometric shapes. In 1976, he received the Oswald Veblen Award from the American Mathematical Society, the highest honor in engineering.
“Stony Brook means a lot to us,” Simons said at the Forbes Philanthropy Summit last year. “The section was regular, however [Nelson] “Rockefeller was a governor and he loved public universities, so I had all the money I needed to build a mathematics department, and I did.”
The school is also where he met Marilyn when she was a PhD student there, and last year he also told the funny, if old-fashioned, story of how they introduced themselves.
“My ex-wife was going to spend the summer in Europe, so I had to take care of our three children, so the university sent someone to see if she would take the job.”He said. “We talked and talked and talked, and finally I said, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ She said no, and the rest is history.”.
The couple continued to invest heavily in math education, and in 2004, they founded Math for America, which provides salaries to 1,000 STEM teachers each year in New York City, distributing more than $300 million over two decades. The foundation donated millions more to the National Museum of Mathematics, known as MoMath, in New York. in 2017 interview with ForbesSimmons explained why helping math teachers is important to him.
“If you know enough math today to teach high school, you probably know enough to work at Google, Goldman Sachs, or Renaissance Technologies.”He said. “They pay a lot more than high school tuition. This means that a lot of people who know this subject will not get into this field, the field of teaching..
The Simons Foundation has also distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to support cancer and autism research at institutions like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
“We have a team of people at the foundation that spend $100 million a year working on autism and understanding it better.”Simons said last September. “Of course, this is not the only thing the institution does, but it is one of the important things it does.”.
One of the foundation’s recent initiatives was a $90 million contribution to the Simons Observatory in Chile, where the finishing touches are being put on advanced telescopes at 17,000 feet near the summit of Cerro Toco, a volcanic mountain in the Atacama Desert. It is hoped that telescopes will be able to observe so-called cosmic microwave background radiation, and map all the radiation dating back to the Big Bang, in more detail than ever before. Simons’ wit and nostalgic curiosity shined through as he concluded his interview with Forbes Last year, discussing the project.
“Traditional thinking is that the universe started out point by point, and then expanded enormously, which is called inflation. If that were true, this massive expansion would cause gravitational waves.” The first thing we will do with this telescope is to see: Do they actually exist? Primordial gravitational waves in the beginning? Simons said.
“I personally hope we don’t find these gravitational waves because I don’t think the universe started with a point. I think the universe came a long way before anything else. But we’ll see.”
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