James Harris Simons

James Harris Jim Simons is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is a code breaker and studies pattern recognition. Simons is the coinventor, with ShiingShen Chern, of the ChernSimons form Chern and Simons160, and contributed to the development of string theory by providing a theoretical framework to combine geometry and topology with quantum field theory. Simons was a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University and was also the former chair of the Mathematics Department at Stony Brook.

James Harris Simons was born to a Jewish family, the only child of Marcia and Matthew Simons, and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father owned a shoe factory.

Source: Wikipedia