the CEO of renaissance technologies, peter brown, is one of geoffrey hinton's (the "godfather of deep learning") earliest students which was a random piece of trivia I thought was pretty interesting
he got poached from an IBM speech recognition team into joining renaissance tech. (many others too, Magerman, the Della Pietra twins etc.), along with his friend robert mercer. (mercer and brown were co-CEOs at ren tech for quite some time)
robert mercer (back when he was still co-CEO) basically single handedly set up trump's victory (
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency) so that's also pretty interesting
also some of Ren Tech's competitors like TGS management have their fair share of money being thrown around (
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/09/mystery-13-billion-philanthropists-revealed.html)
TGSM founder Andrew Shechtel is pretty good with math
https://littlesis.org/person/153348-Andrew_Shechtel/political# ie:
he had entered Johns Hopkins University around the time he turned 16, graduating at 19 with degrees in math and political economy.
yeesh, I was in like 2nd year uni by the time this guy graduated at age 19?? I never stood a chance in this market -_-