Highly recommend Poundstone’s Fortune’s Formula. Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp. This is the book (along with A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street by Lo and MacKinlay) that got me interested in finance.
Rather more precisely, Simons hired Ax to pursue a dream he'd first had with Baum in the 70s, using math to predict markets. Ax had some success, but the Medallion Fund didn't take off until after he left. Berlekamp gets a little credit, but wasn't really there long enough to have major impact. If you want to know who did the real work, figure out who Simons paid the most.
Yeah, came hear to post this. Recently read his autobiography "A Man For All Markets." Simply an incredible and creative man. From beating blackjack to roulette, to discovering Black Scholes before Black and Sholes.
PNP changed the game like no other. Really sad Giuliani and his thugs took him down.
Thorpe is epitome of the best of humanity: creative, fearless, and tenacious. His life story was really inspiring to me.
> Thorpe is epitome of the best of humanity: creative, fearless, and tenacious.
I guess we see what we want to see.
There are a lot of little red flags littered throughout the book. One thing that rankled me was his assertion that he independently discovered Black-Scholes before Merton/Black/Scholes and offered as evidence a chart that post-dated the original paper. There's a lot of stuff like that in the book.
Don't get me wrong, this is a person with many admirable characteristics. Just don't drink the Kool-Aid.
Ed Thorp's "Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One" is one of the best books ever written about quant trading...despite not being about quant trading.
