Behind every billionaire there is a story!

Who is James Simons

Simons is No. 1,” says Bernheim. “Ahead of George Soros. Ahead of Mark Kingdon. Ahead of Bruce Kovner. Ahead of Monroe Trout.”How does Simons do it? Start with a world-class mathematical mind. In 1976, at 38, Simons won the American Mathematics Society’s Veblen Prize — awarded every five years, it is the geometry world’s highest honor — for his work in the excruciatingly esoteric field of differential geometry.  Renaissance, founded in 1982, has 140 employees, one third of whom hold Ph.D.s in hard sciences. Many have studied or taught in Stony Brook’s math department, which Simons chaired from 1968 to 1976. Among their ranks: practitioners in the fields of astrophysics, number theory, computer science and computational linguistics. In notably short supply are finance types. Just two employees, including the head of trading, are Wall Street veterans.

“I have one guy who has a Ph.D. in finance. We don’t hire people from business schools. We don’t hire people from Wall Street,” says Simons. “We hire people who have done good science.”
read the rest in the rare interview he gave to Institutional investor in 2000 here:
http://www.charttricks.com/Resources/Articles/jim_simons.pdf