James Harris Simons (; born 25 April 1938) is an American mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund based in East Setauket, New York. He and his fund are known to be quantitative investors, using mathematical models and algorithms to make investment gains from market inefficiencies. Due to the long-term aggregate investment returns of Renaissance and its Medallion Fund, Simons is described as the "greatest investor on Wall Street," and more specifically "the most successful hedge fund manager of all time." As reported by Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Simons' net worth is estimated to be $25.2 billion, making him the 66th-richest person in the world. Simons is known for his studies on pattern recognition. He developed the Chern–Simons form (with Shiing-Shen Chern), and contributed to the development of string theory by providing a theoretical framework to combine geometry and topology with quantum field theory. In 1994, Simons founded the Simons Foundation with his wife to support researches in mathematics and fundamental sciences. He is one of the biggest donors to the University of California, Berkeley, establishing the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in 2012, and to Berkeley's Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, where he has served as a trustee since 1999. In 2016, asteroid 6618 Jimsimons, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1936, was named after Simons by the International Astronomical Union in honor of his contributions to mathematics and philanthropy. Early life and education James Harris Simons was born on April 25, 1938 to an American Jewish family, the only child of Marcia (née Kantor) and Matthew Simons, and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley under supervision of Bertram Kostant in 1961 at the age of 23. After graduating from MIT, Simons traveled from Boston to Bogotá, Colombia on a motor scooter. Academic and scientific career Simons' mathematical work has primarily focused on the geometry and topology of manifolds. His 1962 Berkeley PhD thesis, written under the direction of Bertram Kostant, gave a new proof of Berger's classification of the holonomy groups of Riemannian manifolds. He subsequently began to work with Shing-Shen Chern on the theory of characteristic classes, eventually discovering the Chern–Simons secondary characteristic classes of 3-manifolds. Later, a mathematical physicist Albert Schwarz