James Simons

Simons Foundation

Co-Founder

2018 Honoree for Outstanding STEM Philanthropy

2018 CME STEM Leadership Award Honoree for Outstanding STEM Philanthropy.

James Harris Simons is the Simons Foundation Chairman and board chair and founder of Renaissance Technologies. Prior to his financial career, Simons was chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University, taught mathematics at MIT and Harvard, and was a cryptanalyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds a B.S. from MIT and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1976, he won the Veblen Prize of the American Mathematics Society for his work in geometry. He is a trustee of the Stony Brook Foundation, Rockefeller University, MIT, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, New York Genome Center and the Institute for Advanced Study, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.