Jim Simons is one of the founders of quantitative trading. He began studying mathematics at MIT at the age of 17 and earned his PhD at the age of 23. He first joined the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) to break Russian codes to help the US government in the Cold War. After the Vietnam War, he wanted a bigger challenge, so he set out to solve one of the toughest challenges in history, the marketplace. It took him and his colleagues more than 10 years to create a secret and complex model t...