Gleuschk · CC BY-SA 3.0
Jim Simons
American mathematician and hedge fund manager
1938 – 2024aged 86
A mathematician who left a chairmanship at Stony Brook, where he'd developed the Chern–Simons form with Shiing-Shen Chern and contributed ideas that later underpinned string theory, to found Renaissance Technologies in 1982. There he built quantitative investing around mathematical models rather than market intuition, an approach that reshaped how much of Wall Street trades. He and his wife Marilyn used the resulting fortune to found the Simons Foundation in 1994, which became a major funder of basic research in mathematics and science.