The billionaire philanthropist and math genius investor Jim Simons died Friday in his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
Simons succeeded at — and in many ways, invented — “quant” trading, which applies computer-driven quantitative modeling to Wall Street investments. Thanks to that success, he donated heavily, mostly to support scientific and medical research, higher education, basic science, and STEM programs and scholarships.
Simons’s largest charitable donation was a $500 million gift in 2023 that he and his wife, Marilyn, gave to Stony Brook University to back scholarships, professorships, research, and clinical care.
The couple had deep ties to the university. Marilyn Simons earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in economics from the university in 1974 and 1984, and Jim Simons served as chairman of Stony Brook’s mathematics department from 1968 to 1978.
That donation may have been their biggest gift to Stony Brook, but it was not their first.
The couple started small, giving the university $750 in 1983. But after their wealth grew from Simons’s extraordinarily profitable investment management firm, Renaissance Technologies, they donated more than $1.2 billion to Stony Brook, directly and through the Simons Foundation, which the couple established in 1994. Some of their Stony Brook gifts created the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, named the medical school, established a STEM scholarship program, and supported nine endowed chairs and professorships in economics.
Other big gifts included $180 million to the New York Genome Center for collaborative research programs in neurodegenerative conditions, neuropsychiatric diseases, and cancer; $85 million to the University of California at Berkeley to support the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing; and $75 million to the City University of New York to create a computational science center and back the university’s participation in the Empire AI project, a New York State-sponsored partnership to create an artificial intelligence computing center focused on improving economic development.
When he died, Simons‘s net worth was pegged at $31.4 billion, according to Forbes. His wealth came after age 40, when he left his math professorship to pursue quant trading. Today, Renaissance Technologies is a $130 billion hedge fund.
Simons grew up in Brookline, Mass. His father was an executive at a shoe manufacturer. The younger Simons fell in love with mathematics in his youth and earned a bachelor’s degree in the field from MIT in 1958 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962. He started his career as a professor at MIT and Harvard and simultaneously worked as a code breaker for the National Security Agency in the 1960s and as a researcher for the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses before joining Stony Brook. In 1976, he won the prestigious Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry.
He started his investment firm in 1978 and would go on to build one of the earliest and most advanced automated stock trading systems, raking in billions during the more than three decades he led Renaissance. The Simonses used their growing wealth to start the Simons Foundation and two other nonprofits, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative and Math for America, which works to bring more math teachers into the profession and support their careers. Today, the program also cultivates science, technology, and engineering teachers.
To see all of the Simonses’ publicly announced donations — and gifts of $1 million or more from other wealthy donors — see the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of gifts and the annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors.
