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The sudden death of the 86-year-old American "old man" has caused unexpected shocks in both academia and industry.
Bigwigs from all walks of life who are engaged in mathematics, computers, physics, and finance are all posting condolences.
Mathematical genius Tao Zhexuan called his investment in modern infrastructure for mathematics and science significant:
The foundation he founded is not only a significant funder of arXiv, but also supports major institutions such as the SLMath Institute (formerly MSRI), as well as the upcoming 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia.
At the same time, I have been fortunate to be supported by the Simons Investigator Award for the past decade or so, which has greatly boosted the many research projects of my team at UCLA.
Clifford Asness, Founder of AQR Capital Management, commented:
Winston Churchill once said that greatness and goodness are seldom owned by one person. James Simons is an exception to this rule.
Chen Baoquan, deputy dean of Peking University's School of Intelligence, said that he "is the originator of quantitative trading, and using mathematical models to make money faster than money printing machines."
So Simmons, where is it sacred?
He is the originator of quantitative trading, the "king of quantification", the founder of the Wall Street myth - Renaissance Technology Company, and its first fund product, Medallion, has an average annual return of 66% over 30 years.
He is a mathematical genius, has taught at MIT and Harvard, won the Oswald Wieblen Prize in Geometry, and has collaborated with Chern and Yang Chenning.
He is also a philanthropist, founded the Simmons Foundation, and donated a "Simmons Chen Building" to Tsinghua University, which has funded projects in many fields such as biology, mathematics, physics, theoretical computer science, and neuroscience.
He also used these words to describe his life:
I did a lot of math. I made a lot of money, and I gave almost all of it away.（我做了大量的数学研究，赚了很多钱，然后几乎全部都捐了出去。 ）
James Simons' storied life has just come to an end.
But his achievements and influence continue to live on.
Making money with mathematical models is faster than money printing machines
Among the many legends in Simmons's life, the most famous is the founding of Renaissance Technologies, which pioneered quantitative trading.
Quantitative trading, simply put, is the use of mathematical models to guide trading decisions, and now one-third of transactions on Wall Street use this method.
Using mathematical models, Simmons turned four investment funds into "virtual money printers," including one called Medallion, which achieved an average annual return of 66 percent over 30 years.
In addition to using mathematics as a tool to create a Wall Street legend, Simmons also contributed to the field of mathematics himself, and Tao Zhexuan called him a famous differential geometrician.
The reason for this is his love of mathematics since childhood.
Simmons was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in April 1938, the son of a shoe factory manager and a stay-at-home mother.
He showed a passion for mathematics early on, and even the way he passed his time was a bit different—sometimes repetitively studying numbers, and sometimes thinking about Zeno's paradox, a series of philosophical puzzles about motion and space-time.
Driven by his interest, Simmons also became a mathematical genius, and in 1958, at the age of 20, Simmons completed his undergraduate studies at MIT.
Not only did he graduate early from his undergraduate program, but Simmons also achieved "speedrunning" in just three years in his doctoral career—in 1961, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley for "a new proof of completeness group classification of Riemannian manifolds", and taught at MIT and Harvard.
But Simmons' first career as a professor was short-lived, and he was drafted into code-breaking and then expelled from the institute in 1968.
But fortunately, during this period of work, Simmons did not let go of his research in mathematics, coupled with his previous genius experience, after Simmons was fired, someone handed him an olive branch and invited him to be the chair of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University (State University of New York at Stony Brook).
It was here that Simmons ushered in the first highlight of his life.
In 1974, he and Chern published a paper entitled "Characteristic forms and geometric invariants," in which he proposed a geometric measurement of Chan-Simons invariants.
Little did the two men know at the time that their work was groundbreaking not only in mathematics, but also in quantum field theory, string theory, and condensed matter physics.
In 1976, Simmons received the American Mathematical Society's Oswald Veblen Prize, the nation's highest geometry award, for his research.
Later, their discovery was developed by the American theoretical physicist and 1990 Fields Medal winner Edward Witten, who developed the Chen-Simons theory.
In 2016, three physicists from the United Kingdom and the United States used the Chen-Simmons theory to describe the fractional quantum Hall effect, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016.
However, Simmons has told TED that neither he nor Chern "know anything about physics" and never expected their findings to be applied to physics, but they are happy with it.
But in fact, Simmons, who "doesn't understand physics", has also personally cooperated with a physicist, and this physicist is Yang Zhenning.
At that time, Yang Zhenning had already won the Nobel Prize for the theory of "non-conservation of universal symmetry", but he was not satisfied with this, and wanted to establish a larger gauge field theory, which is the Yang-Mills equation, which is known as the "cornerstone of modern physics".
However, in the process, Yang Zhenning encountered some difficulties in mathematics, and in this context, through cross-border cooperation, Simmons brought important inspiration to Yang Zhenning, and finally contributed to the establishment of the theory.
△: Yang Zhenning and Simmons, source: Stony Brook University
According to the conventional script, Simmons should continue to soar and achieve more brilliant achievements in the world of mathematics, but only two years after winning the award, Simmons left academia.
Of course, this is not that Simmons has lost interest in mathematics, but that he wants to make a crossover and apply the mathematics he loves to a broader field, and the "experimental object" he chooses at this time is finance that he has never been exposed to before.
In 1978, Simmons officially left academia to start the investment firm Monemetrics, the forerunner of what would become known as the hedge fund Rentec.
Then came the story of Simmons using mathematical models to create four funds, and by the time he stepped down as CEO of Renaissance in 2010, his personal assets had reached $11 billion.
Much of the money he earns is also used for philanthropy, and in 1994, he founded the Simmons Foundation with his wife, Marilyn.
By 2003, the Foundation's first grant was facilitated, with funds being used primarily for research on autism.
As the Foundation has grown, Simmons has expanded its grants to include biology, mathematics, physics, theoretical computer science, neuroscience, and science extension and education, and the Foundation's grantees have won Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, and other top honors, as well as being a key funder of the arXiv platform.
In 2011, on the occasion of Tsinghua University's 110th anniversary, Simmons donated a "Simmons Chen Building" to Tsinghua University to commemorate the cooperation with two Tsinghua alumni, Chern Shiingshen and Yang Zhenning.
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union named the asteroid 6618, discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1936, after Simmons in recognition of his contributions to mathematics and philanthropy.
Since then, in 2023, Simmons has donated $500 million to Stony Brook University, where he once taught, setting a record for a single donation by a U.S. university.
"My life is either A or D"
Before his death, Simmons' net worth was estimated at about $31.4 billion, ranking him 55th on the 2024 Forbes list of the world's richest people.
However, behind the billionaire and many accomplishments, Simmons also has a lesser-known experience.
Like the vast majority, Simmons has been at a low point and has been questioned.
When he first gave up his academic career to found Monemetrics Investments, he had never taken a finance course and was only marginally interested in the markets.
But he believes in himself and believes that a small team of mathematicians, physicists and statisticians, mainly former university colleagues, can analyze financial data, identify market trends, and make profitable trades.
Stocks and bonds have long been the exclusive domain of Wall Street brokerage firms, investment banks, and mutual fund firms. There are a large number of young, energetic MBA analysts at these institutions who hand over the research results of listed companies to senior wealth managers, who use their experience and intuition to select market winners.
Initially, the financial experts were dismissive of Simmons' team and their quantitative approach.
On several occasions, Simmons' approach has led to costly mistakes.
For example, at one point, the company bought a large number of Maine potato futures through a computer program, almost monopolizing the market. This operation has drawn opposition from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures trading in the United States.
In the end, Simmons and the others had to sell their investment in Maine potato futures, missing out on huge potential profits.
In addition to his career, Simmons has not always had smooth sailing in life.
In 1996, his eldest son, Paul Simons, 34, died in an accident riding a bicycle; In 2003, his youngest son, Nicholas Simons, 24, drowned in Bali. In addition, he has two children with his ex-wife and a daughter with his wife, Marilyn Hawrys.
西蒙斯曾向朋友坦言：My life is either aces or deuces.（我的一生，非高潮即低谷。 ）
Even so, Simmons has always been passionate about what he wants to do. In an MIT talk, Simmons shared his five principles:
Do something new and don't go with the flow; Surround yourself with the smartest people you can find; Let beauty lead the way; Don't give up easily; Expect good luck.
Reference Links:
[1]https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/112418885909290483
[2]https://twitter.com/i/trending/1788971366668242948
[3]https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/05/10/remembering-the-life-and-careers-of-jim-simons/
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