Warren Buffett isn’t the best money manager in the world. neither is George Soros or Bill Gross. the world’s best money manager is a man you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re a physicist, in which case you’d know his name immediately.
Jim Simons is coinventor of a brilliant piece of mathematics called the Chern-Simons 3-form, one of the most important parts of string theory. It’s abstract, even abstruse, stuff some say too abstract and speculative, but it has turned Simons into a living legend. He’s the kind of scientist whose name is uttered in hushed tones in the physics departments of Harvard and Princeton.
Simons cuts a professorial figure, with thin white hair and a scraggly beard. In his rare public appearances, he usually wears a rumpled shirt and sports jacket a far cry from the crisp suits and ties worn by most elite traders. He rarely wears socks. His contributions to physics and mathematics are as theoretical as could be, with a focus on classifying the features of complex geometrical shapes. It’s hard to even call him a numbers guy once you reach his level of abstraction, numbers, or anything else that resembles traditional mathematics, are a distant memory.
He is not someone you would expect to find wading into the turbulent waters of hedge fund management. And yet, there he is, the founder of the extraordinarily successful firm renaissance technologies.
Simons created renaissance’s signature fund in 1988, with another mathematician named James Ax.
