Institute for Defense Analyses, every mention

Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired Mar 18, 2024 · 14 mentions

• ▶ 17:48 David Rosenthal He gets a job in Princeton, New Jersey, not at Princeton University, but at the Institute for Defense Analyses, which is a non-profit organization that consults exclusively for the U.S. government, specifically the Defense Department, and…
• ▶ 18:35 David Rosenthal So the IDA there in Princeton kinda functioned like the Institute for Advanced Study, which is also in Princeton.
• ▶ 19:24 David Rosenthal So the way IDA worked, and I assume still works to this day, is they recruited top mathematicians and academics to come be code breakers there.
• ▶ 20:38 David Rosenthal Very quickly after Jim arrives at IDA, remember he's in money-making mode at this point in time, he recruits a bunch of his very brilliant colleagues to come work with him in their 50% free time on an idea to apply the same work and…
• ▶ 23:58 David Rosenthal What they are really doing here at IDA and then soon in Rentech is early machine learning.
• ▶ 27:50 David Rosenthal And it turns out that one of the employees of IDA at this time, and one of the members of this sort of rebel group, shall we say, within the organization, is a guy named Lenny Baum.
• ▶ 31:00 David Rosenthal And that is what they were using at IDA to do code breaking, and that's what they propose in this paper that they could use in the stock market too.
• ▶ 33:28 David Rosenthal They're trying to keep the IDA bosses from knowing what they're doing.
• ▶ 33:51 David Rosenthal So they end up abandoning the effort, both because they can't raise money and because IDA has found out about this and they're not too pleased.
• ▶ 35:19 David Rosenthal Great place at IDA.
• ▶ 38:49 David Rosenthal He has these ideas back from when he was an IDA about what you could do in the markets if you had capital.
• ▶ 40:51 David Rosenthal And he recruits his old IDA buddy, original partner in crime on the trading idea, Lenny Baum, to come and join him.
• ▶ 1:12:54 David Rosenthal So once Jim takes control and moves everything back, he basically decides that he's going to turn Rentech into an even better, even more idealized version of IDA and the math department at Stony Brook.
• ▶ 1:14:42 David Rosenthal This is a quarter century from the time that Baum and Simons write the paper at IDA until Medallion really starts to work.