The legend ends.
On Friday (May 10), local time, the Simmons Foundation announced on its official website that James Harris Simons, the co-founder, mathematician and investor of the foundation, died in New York City on the same day at the age of 86.
An award-winning mathematician and legend in the field of quantitative investing, Simmons turned from academia to investing in his 40s and founded Renaissance Technologies, a precedent for quantitative trading and one of the most profitable investment firms in history, for which he is also known as the "King of Quantitatives". According to the Billionaire Index, Simmons' net worth is estimated to reach 31.8 billion US dollars (about 229.8 billion yuan), ranking 49th on the list of the world's richest people. According to a previous report by China Fund News, Simmons is a world-class mathematician who only started investing at the age of 40 and is known as the "most profitable fund manager" and "the smartest billionaire". Simmons, born in 1938 in Newton, Middlesex County, eastern Massachusetts, USA, was the son of a Massachusetts shoe factory owner and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 with a degree in mathematics. In 1961 (at the age of 23), he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Between 1964 and 1968, Simmons was one of the researchers at the U.S. Institute of Defense Research, where he taught mathematics at both MIT and Harvard. In 1968, he was awarded the position of dean of the School of Mathematics by Stony Brook University at the age of 30. In 1976, Simmons won the American Mathematical Association's Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry for his work on the minimization of multi-plane areas, which proved the 8th dimension of Bernstein's conjecture and became strong evidence for Flamming's conjecture of the plateau problem. Simmons' most famous research result is the discovery and practice of geometric measurement problems, which is named the Chen-Simmons theorem (a joint research result with the famous mainland mathematician Chern). In 1978 (at the age of 40), Simmons left academia to create an investment fund, Limroy, and five years later founded Renaissance Technologies. Unlike Warren Buffett's "value investing", Simmons relies on mathematical models and computers to manage his huge funds. Simmons once said, "I'm Mr. Model, I don't want to do fundamental analysis, and one of the advantages of models is that they can reduce risk." Relying on personal judgment to pick stocks, you may become rich overnight, or you may lose all the money the next day. He believes that models can effectively reduce risk compared to individual investments. It is reported that the first fund product of Renaissance Technology, the Medallion Fund, is known as the "money printing machine". From 1988 to 2019, the annualized rate of return of the medal fund was 39% (the rate of return before fees was 66%!). The fund has a $10 billion investment performance rate with a 5% management fee and a 44% performance incentive, which is unique in the world to date. In comparison, Warren Buffett's average annual net value growth rate from 1965 to 2018 was 21%, and Soros's Quantum Fund had an average annual return of 32% from 1969 to 2000.
Image source: China Fund News Renaissance has more than 200 employees, nearly half of whom are top scientists in mathematics, physics, statistics and other fields, and only two of them have PhDs in finance. The firm never hires business school graduates or Wall Street people, which is unique among investment firms in the United States. "A good mathematician needs to have intuition, always have a strong curiosity about how many things are going to develop, and that's very important to beat the market," Simmons said. In 2008, Simmons ranked first in Alpha magazine's "8th Annual Global Hedge Fund Manager Income Rankings" with a whopping $2.5 billion in revenue. In 2010, he stepped down from Renaissance Technologies, but remained the controlling shareholder and served as Chairman of the Board until 2021, during which time he was involved in the company's major decisions. Simmons spends a lot of money on philanthropy, and he is a major patron of mathematical research, sponsoring conferences, projects, and more around the world. In 1994, he and his wife, Marilyn, founded the Simons Foundation, a major donor to Math for America, a nonprofit organization for high school math and science teachers in the United States. Simmons' Foundation also supports life sciences research, donates to the New York Genome Center, and supports autism research by donating to the Autism Research Initiative. In 2011, Simmons donated a record $150 million to his former employer, Stony Brook University. In January 2022, the Simmons were named to Forbes' list of the 25 most generous donors in the United States. The list shows that the Simmons have donated a total of $3.3 billion.
Source: National Business Daily, Finance Associated Press, China Fund News, Wall Street News, etc
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