Math Wizards
Laufer met Simons at Stony Brook in the 1970s, when he was a professor with expertise in algebraic topology and Simons was chairman of the department. Laufer joined Renaissance full time in 1992 and served as chief scientist.
Mercer and Brown, both Ph.D.s, met in the 1980s at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where they worked on speech recognition and translation using statistical models. They jumped to Renaissance in 1993, applying their math wizardry to the financial markets.
While Medallion was closed to outside investors that year, Renaissance does run several funds open to them. Combined, the firm manages about $42 billion, according to the person familiar with the firm’s operations. The four men’s stakes in funds other than Medallion aren’t included because it could result in double counting.
The riches generated by Medallion have helped keep Mercer and Brown at the firm even as others have gone back to academia or turned to full-time philanthropy. In a rare interview at a 2013 academic conference, they were asked whether they’d still be researching natural-language processing if the pay were the same.
“My dream is when it all ends, to go back to what you guys are doing,” Brown told the audience. “Bob has big spending habits, so...”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.