James H. Simons, PhD
Founder
The Simons Foundation

Jim Simons is president of Euclidean Capital, a family office, and board chair of Renaissance Technologies LLC, a highly quantitative investment firm, from which he retired in 2009 having founded the company and serving as its CEO for over thirty years. Previously he was chairman of the mathematics department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Earlier in his career he was a cryptanalyst at the Institute of Defense Analyses in Princeton, and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Dr. Simons is the founder and chairman of Math for America, a nonprofit organization with a mission to significantly improve math education in our nation’s public schools. He serves as trustee of Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Institute for Advanced Study, Rockefeller University, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He is also a member of the board of the MIT Corporation and chair emeritus of the Stony Brook Foundation. Together with his wife, Marilyn, Dr. Simons manages the Simons Foundation, a charitable organization primarily devoted to scientific research.

The Foundation’s philanthropic activities include, in addition to Math for America, a major research initiative on the causes of autism, and the recent establishment of an institute for research in mathematics and theoretical physics. The Foundation is particularly interested in the growing interface between

the physical and life sciences and has established and endowed several such research programs at universities and institutions both in the US and abroad. Dr. and Mrs. Simons have also privately launched and funded a countrywide health care and training program in Nepal.