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Interesting read on Simons that was on berg the other day. Here's just a few parts of it.

By Richard Teitelbaum
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- On a hot afternoon in September,
Renaissance Technologies LLC founder Jim Simons is too busy to take a phone call. It is, he says, from Cumrun Vafa, a
preeminent Harvard University professor and expert on string
theory, which describes the building blocks of the universe as extended one-dimensional filaments.
``Get another time when I can talk to him,'' Simons tells
his assistant. Then he mentions that the next day, he'll be meeting with Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to discuss autism research. And he's slated that Saturday to host a gala honoring Math for America, or MFA, a four-year-old nonprofit he started that provides stipends to New York City math teachers.
``I'm undoubtedly involved in too many things at the same
time,'' Simons says in his 35th-floor office in midtown
Manhattan. ``But you make your life interesting.''
String theory, autism, math education: It's fair to ask how Simons, 69, manages his day job overseeing the world's biggest hedge fund firm. The answer, judging from the numbers, is very well.
Renaissance is on fire: Its Medallion Fund -- which uses computers and trading algorithms to invest in world markets -- returned more than 50 percent in the first three quarters of 2007. It had about $6 billion in assets as of July 1.
Simons registered that performance as subprime and related markets were collapsing, sending two mortgage-related hedge funds run by Bear Stearns Cos. into bankruptcy. The turmoil pummeled the Goldman Sachs Global Alpha Fund, a rival to Renaissance's funds, which fell more than 25 percent during the same time. Morgan Stanley's computer jockeys lost $390 million in a single day in early August.


Doubling Assets

Along with routine personnel and marketing tasks, Simons takes time for the researchers and programmers who stop by his office to discuss mathematical and statistical issues they've encountered as they work on new trading strategies.
More than 200 employees, of whom about a third have Ph.D.s,
work in East Setauket. Another 100 are based in Manhattan, San
Francisco, London and Milan. ``He creates an environment where
it's easy to be creative and works hard to keep the [censored]
level to a minimum,'' says former managing director Robert Frey,
who worked at Renaissance from 1992 to 2004.
Even without the new commodities fund, Renaissance's assets have more than doubled in a year from about $16 billion on Sept. 30, 2006. That growth has catapulted Renaissance past such titans as Daniel Och's Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates Inc. and David Shaw's D.E. Shaw & Co. to become the world's largest hedge fund manager, according to data compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc. and Bloomberg.

Leaving Academia

In 1977, frustrated with a math problem and eager for
change, he abandoned academia to start what would become
Renaissance, hiring professors, code breakers and statistically minded scientists and engineers who'd worked in astrophysics, language recognition theory and computer programming.
``All the quants in the world are trying to follow in Jim's footsteps because what he's built at Renaissance is truly extraordinary,'' says Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Financial Engineering and chief scientific officer of quant hedge fund firm AlphaSimplexGroup LLC. ``I and many others look up to him as a tremendous
role model.''
The tendency for fund managers to try to emulate Simons may become more curse than blessing in the years ahead. As the selloffs in July and August showed, many quant funds are chasing the same investments. For example, as of June, Renaissance and rival AQR Capital Management LLC had four of the same top 10 stock holdings: Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Chevron Corp.

Wise-Cracking

Renaissance is under increasing pressure to stay ahead of the pack -- and to keep its secrets under wraps. Save current employees and a few former ones, nobody knows precisely how the firm makes its millions. Medallion stopped taking new money from outside investors in 1993 and returned pretty much the last of their capital 12 years later. Today, the fund is run almost exclusively for the benefit of Renaissance staff.
The wise-cracking Simons himself is mum on virtually all of its details. What can he say about Medallion's trading strategy?
``Not much,'' Simons says with a chortle, and then takes a drag on one of the Merit cigarettes he often smokes.
What kind of instruments does it trade?
``Everything.''
How many different strategies does it use?
``A lot.''
Simons says his Ph.D.s laugh when they read the far-fetched theories about what their fund might be doing. One chat room participant speculated that Renaissance uses audio hookups to futures exchanges and analyzes the noise from the pits with voice-recognition software.