Jim Simons, legendary founder of Renaissance Technologies, dies at 86

• Billionaire hedge fund manager Jim Simons has died.
• The legendary investor was 86.
• Simons founded Renaissance Technologies and was an NSA codebreaker, prolific mathematician and philanthropist.

Jim Simons, the legendary billionaire hedge fund manager who founded the wildly successful Renaissance Technologies, died on Friday, according to the foundation he founded.

He was 86 years old.

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Simons was a titan of investing and the 49th richest person in the world with a net worth of $31.8 billion.

Before taking Wall Street by storm, Simons had a career as an award-winning MIT mathematician and NSA codebreaker during the Cold War. His work on pattern recognition and topography would later help form the basis of string theory in quantum mechanics.

Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund specializing in quantitative models, in 1982.

Over three decades, Renaissance has become one of the most successful hedge funds in history, boasting an incredible 66% annual return (before fees) over 30 years.

His fund’s largest current holdings include investments in vaccine manufacturer Novo Nordisk, Uber, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon and Tesla.

In Gregory Zuckerman’s book “The man who solved the market“Simons said he started investing after growing tired of academia.

His strategy was unlike anything else on Wall Street at the time. Simons used the same pattern-recognition talent that had fueled his academic career to mine financial data for trends.

Simons’ algorithmic approach has paid off with huge profits. He had used his enormous wealth as a prolific philanthropist, establishing the Simons Foundation to promote science and mathematics and donating billions of dollars to his causes.

Simons also founded Math for America, a nonprofit organization that supports high school mathematics teachers, and has donated millions to leading universities, including his alma mater, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

“Jim was an extraordinary leader who did transformative work in mathematics and built a world-leading investment firm,” David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, said in a statement.

Simons is survived by his wife, three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild, his foundation said.