Meet James Simons, The Richest Mathematician In The World

Have you ever heard about James Simons? Last year, this hedge fund magnate did make US$194,000, but in terms of an hour. Well, it’s actually not surprising when his wealth reportedly reaches a whopping US$21.5 billion in March 2019. For your information, James Simons is considered as the smartest billionaire as well as the richest mathematician in the world nowadays.

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After he graduated from MIT in 1958, Simons and his friends rode from Boston to Bogotá on motor scooters.

In 2017, Simons was reportedly earned US1.7 billion, making him the highest-earning fund manager on a streak of three years. The outstanding mathematician slightly edged out the runner-up billionaire David Tepper, who earned US1.5 billion in the same period. Earning such billions of dollars per year means the rich mathematician took home roughly US$4.7 million per day, and US$194,000 per hour (In case he would spend his whole 24 hours a day in order to make money).

To put it in comparison, the average annual income of each American individual was about US$60,000, which was three times less than the number Simons made hourly. With such tons of dollars, Simons effortlessly owns a US$ 70 million G650 private jet and a US$100 million super-yacht named Archimedes.

James Simons, who founded a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies, is also a world-class mathematician with a highly-academic profile. Dating back to 1958, he graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and easily earned a Ph.D., also in mathematics, from UC Berkeley just three years later. One of his most famous papers is the work on creating the Chern-Simons form, which had a profound effect on modern physics. Along with other contributions to geometry and topology, Simons has been awarded the Oswald Veblen Price by American Mathematical Society in 1976, when he was 38 years old.

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However, Simons is also a generous philanthropist. In 1994, Simons and his wife Marilyn Simons co-founded the Simons Foundation. The charitable fund has primarily supported education, health, and scientific research.

In early 1964, he was said to work with the NSA - National Security Agency to break codes. The main task of the NSA is the global monitoring, decoding, analysis and translation of information and data for foreign intelligence purposes. He was also a part of the research team of the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) until the year 1968.

After several years taking part in the scientific career, Mr. Simons stepped his very first moves into the financial market. Simons has always had a passion for finances and in the year 1978, he quit academia and founded Monemetrics, a hedge fund management firm that was changed to Renaissance Technologies later. Just in a short time after that, the success of Renaissance Technologies had called the name of James Simons.

Not a pure trader or economist, mathematician Simons built his hedge fund in his own way, where every brick was based on the work of Ph.D. mathematicians, physicists, and statisticians as well. The company has used mathematical and computer-based models to analyze and execute trades for more than two decades. With the strong background of understanding the number collected, now Renaissance is having assets under management estimated about US$100 billion. If you are a math-enthusiast, you can find more articles about mathematicians in our features category.