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The Triple Jeopardy of a Chinese Math Prodigy
A secretive hedge fund used the British court system to punish an IP thief‚ even though he was already in jail.
By Kit Chellel and Jeremy Hodges
Before he was denounced as a thief and cast out of the hedge fund industry, before he was a Goldman Sachs banker or a math prodigy, Ke Xu was a little boy in Hubei province, China, who loved puzzles. His parents, junior government clerks, didn’t have much money, so Xu would scour the house to find old algebra and science textbooks. He spent hours with the series 100,000 Whys, children’s brainteasers with a Maoist flavor. The commune wants to build 40 tractors—how many wheels should it buy?
When Xu was 16, his head teacher identified him as a gifted student and recommended him for a scholarship at the Raffles Institution in Singapore, a prestigious British-style boarding school with the Latin motto Auspicium melioris aevi (Hope of a better age). Xu mastered English and cruised through his classes, if not the school’s extracurricular activities. Cricket was a mystery he could never solve.
After Raffles he moved to the U.K. to study mathematics at Cambridge, eventually graduating third in a class of 250. Then, thousands of miles from home and without any enticing career ideas of his own, Xu took the advice of a professor who’d worked in the City of London’s financial district and applied to Goldman Sachs’s program for recent graduates. He joined the investment bank on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis and soon impressed his colleagues with his quick thinking and work ethic. The others on the credit derivatives pricing team were much like him, math geeks from modest international backgrounds.
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Extremely long article, but very interesting
If you are interested in knowing what happened to Ke Xu, you can read the at Bloomberg Business. Here's the link : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...-jeopardy-of-ke-xu-a-chinese-hedge-fund-quant
A secretive hedge fund used the British court system to punish an IP thief‚ even though he was already in jail.
By Kit Chellel and Jeremy Hodges
Before he was denounced as a thief and cast out of the hedge fund industry, before he was a Goldman Sachs banker or a math prodigy, Ke Xu was a little boy in Hubei province, China, who loved puzzles. His parents, junior government clerks, didn’t have much money, so Xu would scour the house to find old algebra and science textbooks. He spent hours with the series 100,000 Whys, children’s brainteasers with a Maoist flavor. The commune wants to build 40 tractors—how many wheels should it buy?
When Xu was 16, his head teacher identified him as a gifted student and recommended him for a scholarship at the Raffles Institution in Singapore, a prestigious British-style boarding school with the Latin motto Auspicium melioris aevi (Hope of a better age). Xu mastered English and cruised through his classes, if not the school’s extracurricular activities. Cricket was a mystery he could never solve.
After Raffles he moved to the U.K. to study mathematics at Cambridge, eventually graduating third in a class of 250. Then, thousands of miles from home and without any enticing career ideas of his own, Xu took the advice of a professor who’d worked in the City of London’s financial district and applied to Goldman Sachs’s program for recent graduates. He joined the investment bank on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis and soon impressed his colleagues with his quick thinking and work ethic. The others on the credit derivatives pricing team were much like him, math geeks from modest international backgrounds.
............................
Extremely long article, but very interesting
If you are interested in knowing what happened to Ke Xu, you can read the at Bloomberg Business. Here's the link : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...-jeopardy-of-ke-xu-a-chinese-hedge-fund-quant
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