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A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity
- cliveowen 12y agoStrange how I never heard of him before. While being both rich and an extremely accomplished individual, he seems to defy the stereotype of the mad genius.
- nilkn 12y agoI only know about him because of Renaissance Technologies, which is renowned in some circles as being extraordinarily hard to get a job at. They're known for snagging repeat Putnam Fellows. Last I heard Reid Barton ended up there.
- zeeshanm 12y agoI know him since he was math department chair at my alma mater!
- tomp 12y agoThe Putnam Competition questions seem very interesting. http://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/ http://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/
- whatusername 12y ago2546 days ago.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- kooshball 12y agoThat's a pretty funny thread. Near the bottom you see this guy talking about his startup ideas and Drew Houston replies and asked him if he wants to help with Dropbox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088
- whatusername 12y agoAnd of course -- Colin's tarsnap is still essentially the same as it ever was (a brilliant technical solution with awful marketing) - and Dropbox is one of the jewel's in YC's crown. (See this recent post on tarsnap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 )
- chaoxu 12y agoI know him because my independent study professor for analysis canceled his meeting with me because Simons took half of the math department for a cruise vacation. Well, I was happy. I didn't finish my hw that week. :)
- melling 12y agoGuess he hasn't been mentioned on HN for a while, and when he does get posted it doesn't look like he's voted up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3927653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196370 - Actual comments
- mempko 12y agoAnother "if i can do it, so can you" story. Fuck that message , I am never going to be a billionaire and you won't be either. And it isn't for a lack of talent, or effort.
- beachstartup 12y ago> I am never going to be a billionaire and you won't be either. i'm pretty sure at least one or two billionaires read HN, so, keeping in mind the audience, you're probably wrong.
- sanoli 12y agoone or two out of how many? That's like Usain Bolt saying "if I can break the 100 WR, so can you" in a forum where Asafa Powell also hangs out.
- beachstartup 12y agono, what gp is saying is "i'll never be usain bolt so why would i ever want to be a runner?"
- onion2k 12y agoWhile he's 'wrong' in the strictest sense that there might be someone reading who'll go on to make billions, anyone reading that comment and thinking "I will be!" is much more likely to be wrong. The chance of one person in a pool of thousands becoming a billionaire is a great deal more likely than any individual making it happen, even though both are very unlikely. So probabilistically he's right.
- gambiting 12y agoYou can't win Tour de France if you don't start cycling. With his attitude there is no point in getting on the bike in the first place, because probabilistically it's unlikely you will ever win, right?
- nitinics 12y agoFYI http://www.nsi.edu.np/?option=com_content&func=details&id=36 http://www.nsi.edu.np/?option=com_content&func=details&id=36. This is the story about Nick. How he went to Nepal, worked there, grew fonder and after his death - still lives with the organization that helps train and support healthcare workers in rural Nepal. I am from Nepal, I love mathematics, computing and sustainable development and good to know about his father, today.
- nemo44x 12y agoThank you for that. Nick was a friend of mine and I miss him. He loved Nepal and working there.
- samtimalsina 12y agoI am from Nepal too. Don't see many Nepalese around on HN.
- carlob 12y agoI met the man a few years ago. He was touring one of his many academic endeavors and he wanted a full day of seminars to see how the research he was financing was advancing. I was really impressed by the scope of his questions, which were about things completely outside his previous research (computational/quantitative biology mostly).
- dsugarman 12y agothe power of Stony Brook University
- nemo44x 12y agoI went to college with his late son, Nick. Nick was a good guy and their family was really welcoming and friendly. I remember speaking with Jim during the .com crash as I was getting my CS degree and he mentioned a CS degree is a great thing to have if you love it - keep at it. Solid advice at the time. But make no mistake - when he says he wasn't as fast as some of the others, it's a whole different ballgame. He's a world class genius with creativity and personality to boot. He's also a good guy who is quite generous.
- mdkras 12y agoYeah - It seems strange that the early parts of the article try to paint him as one who has failed but still overcome adversity. It is challenging to argue that at any point he wasn't very, very successful. It would seem more appropriate to point out that despite his tremendous capabilities, he still has faults and has experienced awful tragedy. The article veers that way towards the end. Sounds like good people; glad to read about someone with substantial means helping drive education and science.
- BrandonMarc 12y agoGood point. I suspect that the author is accustomed to a certain narrative - triumph over adversity - or, believes news readers are more keen to that kind of story.
- ylem 12y agoI think it could be a question of who he compares himself against. For example, if he's comparing himself to Field's medalists, then he might feel that he comes up short.
- TheBiv 12y agoFYI The Physics of Wall Street gives a lot of reference to what type of trading James does, and chronicles a lot of James's history! The book also goes into a lot of the history of these types of traders! It is an insanely interesting read! http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544112431 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544112431
- zeeshanm 12y agoAnother good one is "Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson.
- foobarqux 12y agoI doubt it. No one seems to know their strategies or replicate their returns.
- cdwhite 12y agoI thoroughly enjoyed /The Physics of Wall Street/, but I found that it was heavier on the "physics" than on the "Wall Street". It depends on what you're looking for. If you want accessible, non-mathematical descriptions of the analytical tools that have been imported into finance from physics, or even an insightful look at the culture of physics and how how physicists tend to approach problems, Weatherall's your man---though I wonder how intelligible those descriptions really would be to someone who hasn't already seen the material in a more formal way. (I'm reminded of the description of the Feynman lectures from the introduction to that big red boxed set, IIRC: "Rereading the books, one sometimes seems to catch Feynman looking over his shoulder, not at his young audience, but directly at his colleagues, saying 'Look at that! Look how I finessed that point! Wasn’t that clever?'".) Thing is, my background is in physics, so I'm more interested in what physicists call "sociology": how institutions are put together, what the incentive structures are, how individual personalities affect outcomes, etc., and I found Weatherall's descriptions of such things lacking. His analysis tends towards hagiography of individual scientists, with less attention for context. This intensely biographical approach to the history of science is a common-enough failing in books that focus on the science, not the history---it reminded me a bit of those boxes about the lives of prominent scientists that dot some introductory textbooks---but it's still frustrating. I actually found Roger Lowenstein's /When Genius Failed/ much more illuminating---he gives more attention to institutions, incentives, and personalities, and how they interact. Edit: missing word, style
- michaelochurch 12y agoI have a few friends who worked at RenTech, and the one thing that bothers me is the secrecy. It's the one company I know of (outside of security-clearance jobs) where you're not allowed to say that you worked there. I feel like that probably makes it harder for people to resume their careers if they leave. Given that the best way to get a decent startup/VC job is to come out of a hedge fund, I can imagine it hurting people if they can't say where they worked. I've heard that there's PhD bigotry there, too, and that's it's nearly impossible to get in if you don't have a PhD; but I don't know enough to confirm or deny that. It could be completely untrue, or it could just be that most people who make the cut and know about RenTech happen to have PhDs. He sounds like a stand-up guy, though, and compared to the ethical dirt on an average Silicon Valley CEO, this stuff (which isn't even ethical dirt so much as practical disagreement) is negligible.
- JumpCrisscross 12y agoIt is not impossible to get a RenTech job offer without a PhD. Yes, they will batter you down during interviews if you don't have one. Taking a job at Renaissance Technologies is a commitment, on both sides. The culture of secrecy and non-competes is designed to filter away, even before the interview, candidates (a) unsure about their willingness to commit and (b) looking for a short-term career booster.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoThe culture of secrecy and non-competes is designed to filter away, even before the interview, candidates (a) unsure about their willingness to commit What are the benefits of working at RenTech? They seem to be asking candidates to take a huge risk to their careers, due to the legally-mandated secrecy. That suggests there's a proportionally huge payoff in working there. What is it?
- dman 12y agoApart from the great pay you get to invest in RenTech funds. I might be wrong but I think at this point theyre just working to manage their own money and not taking any money from investors. Above all else - working with smart people is its own reward.
- josu 12y agoIf you are interested in working for his company, there seem to be some openings for programmers: https://www.rentec.com/vm/jobs.vm https://www.rentec.com/vm/jobs.vm
- grmarcil 12y agoCouldn't help but smile at this. This is kind of the quant finance equivalent of pointing out that the Navy SEALs are taking applications.
- coldtea 12y agoWell, the Navy SEALs are taking applications. And it's not that difficult to get in, if you're determined enough and in a healthy condition. People on HN work in ever more prestigious and/or difficult to get in companies that this.
- jburwell 12y agoYou clearly do not understand physical and mental capacity required to complete BUD/S and SQT nor have you ever meet a current or former Tier 1 operator. Navy SEALs are not only some of the most physically talent people on Earth, but also some of the smartest. 100-110 of the most physically fit, determined folks you'll ever meet start BUD/S every quarter, and only 10-20 graduate -- easily more difficult to land a position as an operator than almost any job you can imagine.
- spacefight 12y agoOne could argue, that some of the smartest people can hardly be smart if they voluntarily join a military force.
- spain 12y agoDoesn't seem like that great of an argument to me.
- troymc 12y agoNot mentioned in the article, but probably familiar to others on HN, the Simons Foundation also supports Quanta Magazine (e.g. see their recent article about pilot wave theory [1]) and arXiv.org (an archive of pre-publication papers, mostly in physics and mathematics). [1] http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-hint-at-concrete-quantum-reality/ http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-...
- dekhn 12y agoSome of the highest quality science journalism I've seen.
- hyperliner 12y agoSpeculating (never actually been involved in hedge fund or super advanced math): what are some potential ideas that RenTec could be working on? Please state your speculation in terms of the mathematical / investment problem to be solved. My super simple experience here relates to optimizing portfolios along the efficient frontier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier) which is a relatively simple problem, but I am interested in knowing what I don't know.
- Tycho 12y agoThere's a very long multi-year thread at a website called Nuclear Phynance about this. Nobody seemed to have the faintest clue although amusingly some of the more outlandish suggestions were later (laughingly) cited by an insider in an interview. One decent general idea was that RenTec was willing to entertain purely statistical signals with no intuition to back them up (or, alternatively, unintuitive signals which you can explain in plain language but sound stupid). There was an intesting quote from Simons about how astronomers are the best suited hires because they are used to making measurements/hypotheses purely from observation, without the chance to do controlled experiments. It was also noted that they seemed to employ a lot of NLP specialists, although consensus was that this was down to pattern recognition rather than anything to do with language. The best suggestion (or at least the best sounding one) was that they were doing hidden-markov models which took into accound second and third order effects. And then there's always just the 'best execution' argument (doing basic market making but engineering better systems than anyone else). However information on them is so scarce I sometimes wonder if most of what we hear is pure myth.
- elwell 12y ago> One morning in Katmandu, as he relaxed on a hotel porch, the structure of a proof suddenly came to him.
- gwern 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_%28psychology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_%28psychology%29 at work?
- foobarqux 12y agoThe article distorts the history of RenTech. I believe Simons started doing non-quant trading and he acquired RenTech, which was started by Berlekamp.
- tzs 12y agoThat does not appear to be the case, at least according to anything I've been able to find with a bit of searching. I think you are thinking of Axcom, which RenTec acquired. Axcom was associated with Berlekamp (he was either founder, co-founder, or purchased a majority interest after it was founded...the internet is unclear on this).
- foobarqux 12y agoI'm pretty sure that the RenTech business of today grew primarily out of Berlekamp's venture and not anything pre-existing, whatever it was called.
- auntienomen 12y agoThere was a Bloomberg article about this some years ago. Axcom was run by James Ax, and jointly owned by Ax & Simons. (Axcom was a 'trading advisor'. They made recommendations to Renaissance, which managed a fund based on these recommendations.) Ax was in essence hired by Simons to explore & develop quantitative trading ideas Simons & Baum had come up with while they were making more traditional trades. Berlekamp came along several years later, as a consultant. One can find claims that he developed a lot of RenTech's IP, but as far as I can tell these claims are sourced from Berlekamp himself. Since Berlekamp's own fund went out of business after a few years of operation, I'm inclined to dismiss these claims as marketing.
- vellum 12y ago> There was a Bloomberg article about this some years ago. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0108_story1.html http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0108_stor...
- biohax2015 12y agoAnyone wanna demonstrate how one would formalize the phrase "pass it on"?
- Bakkot 12y agoWell, I'm not going to have a compact answer for you, but to do so you need to develop some kind of self-reference. (Like Godel!) If you like thinking about this sort of thing, Raymond Smullyan has a lot of great writing - I'd recommend eg Forever Undecided or To Mock a Mockingbird for a more informal treatment, or First-Order Logic for a formal one.
- tunesmith 12y agoIn symbolic modal logic, it would be along the lines of... if an action is done to you, then accept the belief of the imperative of doing that action to another. So, it would be a command for you to intend to do that action to another. Axu -> _u_: A_u_y (those are supposed to be underlines indicating imperatives.) This is the same sort of convention that Harry Gensler uses to prove the Golden Rule using his Formal Ethics system. (I should note I am not a logician and this is probably only a rough approximation - not sure whether it's appropriate to use A instead of a, etc.)
- schoen 12y agoIs it clear to everybody from the context whether he meant "pass it on" in the sense of "pay it forward" or "pass it on" in the sense of "repeat this message"? I was thinking first of the game of Telephone. "James Simons is a mathematician, pass it on!"
- linux_devil 12y agoInspirational !
- schoen 12y agoCan anybody make an attempt at explaining the content of "Axiomatic Characterization of Ordinary Differential Cohomology" further than the article did? I don't know any algebraic topology; the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_%28mathematics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_%28mathematics%29 looks extremely clever to me but I can see where this subject matter would start to get challenging to explain.
- j2kun 12y agoIt builds not just on algebraic topology, but algebraic geometry, differential manifolds, and category theory (which underlies all three of these). If you don't have at least passing familiarity with the core content of these fields, you're probably not going to find an explanation worth spending any time on. A better place to start might be de Rham cohomology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rham_cohomology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rham_cohomology
- schoen 12y agoThanks! I think I'll go off and study some mathematics.
- kskz 12y agoWe can formally add and subtract simplices. Homology is (very roughly) counting holes using the modulus (%) operator with respect to this addition and subtraction.
- hackuser 12y agoI see sentences like this one in more and more articles these days: > Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. A predictable consequence of reducing government spending is that the population becomes dependent on, and concentrates power in the hands of, a few wealthy citizens. For example, I've read that if you need funding for research, you should seriously consider networking with the very wealthy. If you run a charity, probably you need to focus on the same. Will these patrons support academic freedom? An organization that challenges the social order? What if your research upsets someone; is your career/organization at risk? Will their ideas and whims serve the nation and world? (I'm not criticizing of Simons' philanthropy; I'm against shrinking government investment in research and other social goods.)
- Tycho 12y agoThat's the way it should be, IMO. Government research leads to things like WMDs.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 12y agoAlso penicillin and the smallpox vaccine, the internet - but you know, whatever...
- Tycho 12y agoSo? What's your argument?
- factorizer 12y agoDon't know what his argument was. Mine is: You're probably a troll and nobody should feed you.
- kyberias 12y agoThe article mentions his interest in "gene puzzles". Does anyone know what does this refer to exactly?
- ZBA 12y agoGenerally, it just applies to understanding how certain genes underlie the genetic basis of certain genetic diseases. I believe Simons in particular funds areas of computational biology that strive to gain insight into the cascade effect. This occurs in many diseases, which make them seem nearly incurable, like sepsis or cancer. For example, when TNF (tumor necrosis factor0 activates inappropriately on the periphery of a cell it, to dramatically simplify, leads to growth during inappropriate stages of your life (adulthood), and triggers a cascade of thousands of events. When one event is altered, the cascade goes through a different direction, to the same goal. So understanding the pathway, and how everything interacts, is something I know the Simons foundation has funded in the past. With the hope that one day medications that properly fight the cascade can be achieved.
- igivanov 12y agoIt's all fascinating all right in many respects, but doesn't the noble business of fast trades and hedge funds give anyone on HN creeps anymore? After all it's moneymaking in a form of taxing the society as a whole (if you think that this money comes out of nowhere or somehow is a newly created value, think again). Of course he used some of this money for good purposes, but still.
- saym 12y agoSo, I'm against HFTs that trade on faster connections than others in the same pool. That advantage makes other traders BE the news on which to trade. But I think HFTs in a marketplace where execution speed is equal can serve to provide liquidity, not siphon it out. I could be wrong, but I'll wait to be more enlightened on the subject to change my opinion.
- igivanov 12y agoWhy do you need millisecond(or is it microsecond?)-fast liquidity? What's wrong if there's a 10s or 1min window?
- vasilipupkin 12y agoThis is a curious argument. If a car mechanic changes oil in your car and charges you 20 bucks, does he tax society $20? no, in this case value is being created, which is a fixed car. In the case of Rentec and other firms, the value is more liquid markets with different assets priced fairly with respect to each other. You may think that value is small, and it probably is, compared to say, saving lives, etc. - but it is no less real
- igivanov 12y agoFrom Wikipedia "In business, economics or investment, market liquidity is a market's ability to facilitate an asset being sold quickly without having to reduce its price very much (or even at all)." That's as much as I know about liquidity, so I am prepared to be enlightened. If you are an investor (as opposed to an HFT trader), what problem of yours does it solve if you can buy/sell in 1min or 10s or 1s, as opposed to in 0.001s or 0.0012s? If not your problem, then maybe of the society as a whole, or some group within it, excluding those who benefit from HFT trading as such?
- pyfish 12y agoAn amazing man and a testament to the power of curiosity.
- kimonos 12y agoGreat post! Thank you for the inspirational insights you have shared..
- taurath 12y agoHe says "if I can do it, so can you" - he had a doctorate at age 23, which is not something most people can do, even if they have the intelligence and drive. Very interesting person for sure.
- downandout 12y agoA bit off topic, but he made his money managing hedge funds. There are lots of "quant" type people that could do as well as he has, but almost no one has access to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of others' money to deploy. While some attempts have been made, I haven't yet seen a decent solution to bring the best forecasting together with large amounts of capital. Somebody please work on that.
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- jflowers45 12y agoSeems like a good dude who's using his brain and his money to advance important fields.