Jim Simons is a mathematician and cryptographer who realized that the complex math he used to break codes could help explain financial patterns – and he made billions because of it in his notoriously secretive hedge fund firm called Renaissance Technologies.
He is famous not only for the duration of his success and the size of his results ... but also for the way he made his money (with much lower volatility and risk than his peers and competitors).
His background is impressive. Simons taught at Harvard and MIT and worked with the NSA. Here is a video where he shares some thoughts in a 2015 TED talk interview. It's worth a watch.
TED via Youtube
Interesting stuff ... I hope you got something from it.
Despite advanced math still being a mystery to many, most rely on it more than ever ... for example, look at what we're seeing with the growth of machine learning and AI.
The Heart of AI is Still in Humans
Simons built a team of mathematicians whose motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science (rather than hired guns who could be lured away by money).
That doesn't mean money wasn't a motivator, but it hits on something important.
The heart of good math and good AI will always benefit from the quality of the humans around it. You still have to champion integrity, culture, and purpose.
Better Math as a Competitive Advantage
We stayed ahead of the pack by finding other approaches and shorter-term approaches to some extent ... but the real thing was to gather a tremendous amount of data – Jim Simons
If you've been to our office, or heard me speak, you know how important I believe those ideas are to continuing prosperity.
Constant innovation on a massive scope and scale create more ways to win.
Onwards!
Understanding the Scope and Scale of Humanity (and Our Impact)
"Progress is the attraction that moves humanity." ~ Marcus Garvey
Human expansion and development is without precedent. We're in an entirely new territory. People could "only imagine" many of the things we take for granted today.
To put it in perspective.
While growth is slowing down, and we're reaching carrying capacity, the population is still on the rise.
Technology is Growing Exponentially
The only thing that's perhaps more impressive than our population growth is our technological growth. For the first ~ 64,000 years of humanity, we relied upon the verbal transfer of information. The creation of writing and the formal recording of knowledge was the tinder for a blaze of progress.
The above graph stops in 1990, and it's almost hard to quantify the growth since then. Nonetheless, Moore's Law does a good job of adding some context (even if it is coming to an end).
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Extrapolated outwards, we can expect more technologies to evolve every two years, if not faster.
Information is the fuel for so much of human progress and it most embodies the future to me. We create more data today than in all of history and digest more data today than ever before.
As our ability to parse information increases ... so do our capabilities.
History is defined by asymmetric information, but our future may not be. The growth in information creation and digestion - I believe - will have massive effects on how we congregate, what we create, and how we interact with each other and the corporate world around us.
I can't begin to imagine what my children's children will have at their disposal.
What's the coolest future-tech you expect to see in your lifetime?
Posted at 01:33 PM in Current Affairs, Gadgets, Ideas, Market Commentary, Science, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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