Departures

Jim Simons

Simons, a philanthropist and mathematics innovator who made a fortune as one of Wall Street’s first quantitative investors, died May 10 at age 86. A UC Berkeley graduate, Simons taught at Harvard and MIT before chairing the math department at Stony Brook University starting in 1968. A decade later, Simons left Stony Brook and set up a small investment firm dedicated to using quantitative analysis to decode stock market trends. The company, staffed with mathematicians and eventually known as Renaissance Technologies, achieved spectacular results: Its Medallion Fund, started in 1988, earned investors an average annual return of 66 percent.

K.P. Yohannan

An author, evangelist, and missions agency founder, Yohannan died May 8. He was 74. Born to a family of St. Thomas Christians in southern India, Yohannan studied at Criswell College in the 1970s and began the missions organization Gospel for Asia, committing to train native missionaries to take the good news to parts of Asia and Africa. The ministry, now known as GFA World, trained over 100,000 evangelists and pastors with Western support. But in 2019 it spent $37 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed it had misspent donations. Yohannan also founded a church denomination in 1993 and became its metropolitan bishop. Today, Believers Eastern Church claims more than 12,000 congregations across 18 countries.