Dr. James H. Simons is President of Renaissance Technologies LLC, a private investment firm with roughly $25 billion under management that uses innovative mathematical methods to make investment decisions. Previously, Dr. Simons was Professor and Chairman of the Mathematics Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a cryptanalyst at the Institute of Defense Analyses in Princeton, a Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Assistant Professor of mathematics at Harvard University.
Dr. Simons holds a B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. His scientific research was in the area of geometry and topology. He received the American Mathematical Society Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1975 for work that involved a recasting of the subject of area minimizing multi-dimensional surfaces. A consequence was the settling of two classical questions, the Bernstein Conjecture and the Plateau Problem. Dr. Simons' most influential research involved the discovery and application of certain geometric measurements, now called the Chern-Simons Invariants, which have wide use, particularly in theoretical physics.
Dr. Simons is the founder and Chairman of Math for America (MƒA), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to significantly improve math education in our nation's public schools. The MƒA Fellowship recruits, trains, and retains people who are new to teaching, and the MƒA Master Teacher program recognizes and rewards already certified exceptional secondary math teachers.
He serves as Trustee of Brookhaven National Laboratory, The Institute for Advanced Study, The Rockefeller University and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. Dr. Simons is also a member of the Board of the MIT Corporation and Chair Emeritus of the Stony Brook Foundation. In addition, with his wife, Marilyn, Dr. Simons manages The Simons Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to advance research in the sciences and mathematics. The Foundation launched The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative to support research to better understand the causes of autism.
Dr. Simons lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter, Audrey. His older children, Liz and Nathaniel, live in California.
