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Overview

Jim Simons is a mathematician who likes to watch financial patterns. He thinks of them as fish or nebulae, and he knows that they’re all made up of math. By using mathematics, he can predict changes in those patterns, which allows him to make money.

Jim Simons is a very successful investor who has made billions of dollars over his career. He’s so good at what he does that people call him the gold standard in investing. His hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, is considered one of the most successful and innovative funds in the world. Although he’s been incredibly successful with his hedge fund business, Jim Simons isn’t just an investor: he’s also won awards for being a geometer and code breaker; as well as having helped support charities around the world. To learn more about Jim Simons’ life, start by reading these points below:

Big Idea #1: Jim Simons was obsessed with math from a very early age.

Jim Simons was born in 1938 to a Jewish family. He had an unusual talent for numbers and began showing that interest at age three. His parents found him dividing numbers by two, all the way from 1024 down to one. This is an astonishing feat for any child his age.

Jim was confused when his father stopped to fill up the car with gas, as he couldn’t understand why they had to do that. He thought that if half of what’s in the tank is used up, then there would still be another half left; so if they use up half of that remaining amount, there would still be another quarter left and so on.

A four-year-old boy was on his way to becoming a great mathematician. The boy had unknowingly stumbled upon one of the classic mathematical problems, which dates back to Greek times. In this problem, you always have half the distance left until you reach your destination no matter how small it is. This means that you can never reach your destination if you travel in this manner. However, he was encouraged by his family doctor to pursue medicine because doctors make good money and are respected members of society (“a bright Jewish boy”). He didn’t listen though; instead he pursued mathematics because he liked it better than medicine.

He went to MIT and studied math. He struggled at first, but then he had a moment of clarity where he realized that if he really wanted to learn the more complex formulae, it would help him out in the long run. After that experience, his grades improved significantly. He loved how math seemed like some kind of code for understanding the world’s mysteries, so he often contemplated equations while lying on his back with his eyes closed.

One day, Paul Erdős saw two of his professors at a café. They were both renowned mathematicians and they were deep in discussion until the wee hours of the morning. Inspired by their lifestyle, he decided that he wanted to live like them: smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and doing mathematics all night long.

Big Idea #2: Soon after his studies, Simons entered academia, but quit suddenly to crack Soviet codes for an intelligence agency.

After getting a Ph.D from MIT and Berkeley, Simons looked for a teaching job. At Berkeley, he finished his PhD in two years and it was brilliant enough to get him a job at Harvard University as an instructor.

He was a popular professor at the college, and he had an informal style of teaching. He would dress casually (sometimes not wearing socks), and his enthusiasm matched this casualness. In some cases, he admitted that he didn’t know as much about certain topics as his students did because they were more advanced in their studies than him.