Jim Simons quote resurfaces online

Jim Simons’ line about hiring scientists over traditional finance candidates is circulating again because it compresses a long-running quant-industry preference into one sentence. The quote was reposted on X by the Quantscience_ account and spread through quant circles as a shorthand for how some firms think about talent pipelines. The line itself is not new. Jim Simons used it publicly during a 2022 conversation organized by the Abel Prize, where he said Renaissance Technologies had hired “statisticians, physicists, astronomers, mathematicians” in its early years and added: “You can teach a physicist finance, but you can’t teach a finance person physics.” The event was held at the University of Oslo on May 25, 2022, according to the Abel Prize video record. (x.com) ### Where did the quote actually come from? The Abel Prize conversation is the clearest public source tying the wording directly to Simons. Secondary reports published after that event also attributed the line to the same 2022 appearance, including Business Insider’s June 2022 account of Simons’ remarks on hiring and investing. The wording matters because it was framed as a hiring philosophy, not a throwaway line. (youtube.com) In the same discussion, Simons said Renaissance’s early recruiting emphasized very smart people from technical fields rather than conventional Wall Street backgrounds. ### Why does this sentence keep resurfacing in quant circles? (youtube.com) Renaissance Technologies has long occupied a special place in quant finance because Simons built the firm around mathematicians, scientists and code-driven research rather than discretionary stock-picking. That makes almost any concise Simons line about talent unusually portable on social platforms used by students, recruiters and practitioners. (markets.businessinsider.com) The repost also lands in a labor market where quant roles are still commonly associated with physics, mathematics, statistics and computer science training. The quote gives online users a simple way to talk about a more complex hiring question: whether firms value domain knowledge in markets more than technical training in modeling and inference. That reading is an inference from how the post circulated, rather than a statement Simons made in the repost itself. (markets.businessinsider.com) ### Did Simons literally mean finance people cannot learn technical work? Simons’ public comments point more narrowly to comparative training costs than to an absolute judgment about who can learn what. His broader remarks in the 2022 conversation emphasized recruiting “the smartest and best people” and letting them work, which fits a view that deep scientific training was especially useful for Renaissance’s research style. (x.com) Gregory Zuckerman, whose reporting on Simons and Renaissance has often been cited in coverage of the firm, has described Renaissance as a place that rarely hired to fill a narrow need and instead sought top technical talent expected to improve the trading operation. That characterization, quoted in later summaries of Simons’ management style, helps explain why the line is often treated as a statement about team design as much as hiring. (markets.businessinsider.com) ### What does the quote leave out about modern quant hiring? The sentence is memorable partly because it is blunt, but modern quant hiring is broader than the quote suggests. Firms today recruit from physics and mathematics, but also from computer science, statistics, engineering and, in some cases, economics and finance for roles tied to execution, risk, portfolio construction and market structure. That broader mix is reflected in how Simons himself described Renaissance’s early hires: not just physicists, but statisticians, astronomers and mathematicians. (moneydown.org) The repost therefore functions less as a literal hiring rulebook than as a durable artifact from Simons’ account of how Renaissance was built. The underlying source remains the Abel Prize conversation published in June 2022 from an event recorded in Oslo on May 25, 2022, where the full remarks can still be reviewed in context. (youtube.com) (markets.businessinsider.com)