“Try to get on a great team,” he says.

John Nash, the game theorist and mathematician who later would be immortalized in Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind.

Berlekamp came to realize that much of human interaction is colored by shades of gray that he sometimes found difficult to discern.

Brown’s view reflected the sentiments of some at Renaissance who felt that while Kononenko ruffled feathers and could be unusually blunt, his behavior likely reflected the culture he had become accustomed to in Russia. Mercer said hardly anything, of course, but he seemed to agree with Brown and others at the table voting to ignore Kononenko’s

“But he didn’t steal from us,” alluding to the alleged actions of Belopolsky and Volfbeyn.

“There’s no data like more data,” Mercer told a colleague, an expression that became the firm’s hokey mantra.

Gann concluded that a universal, natural order governed all facets of life—something he called the Law of Vibration—and that geometric sequences and angles could be used to predict market action. To this day, Gann analysis remains a reasonably popular branch of technical trading.

“If you trade a lot, you only need to be right 51 percent of the time,” Berlekamp argued to a colleague. “We need a smaller edge on each trade.”

An eighteenth-century Japanese rice merchant and speculator named Munehisa Homma, known as the “god of the markets,” invented a charting method to visualize the open, high, low, and closing price levels for the country’s rice exchanges over a period of time. Homma’s charts, including the classic candlestick pattern, resulted in an early and