The Physics of Wall Street: a brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

Acknowledgments 
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Some friends and colleagues, in addition to providing valuable in-
sights along the way, also read earlier drafts and offered comments. 
In every case, their thoughts helped to improve the book in material 
ways. thank you, Jeff Barrett, chris clearfield, Bennett Holman, John 
Horgan, clay Kaminsky, david Malament, Matt nguyen, and erin 
Pearson.
this book would never have been written without the help and en-
couragement of my agent, Zoë Pagnamenta. She has been a constant 
source of good advice from the first inkling of an idea through to the 
final manuscript. I was very lucky to find her — not least because she 
helped sell the book to the most brilliant (and patient) editor I can 
imagine, Amanda cook, who deserves complete credit for anything 
good in it. She has been a saint through the entire process, and she 
made the book a joy to write. I am also very grateful to the book’s pub-
lisher, Bruce nichols, for his support from the beginning and for ably 
taking the helm at the very end, when Amanda left Houghton Mifflin 
Harcourt. And thank you, too, to Ashley Gilliam, for all her help along 
the way.
My family has been very supportive throughout this process, and 
I am grateful for it. thank you to my sister, Katie, and my sisters-in-
law, tara, Lauren, and carolyn, for many welcome distractions. (And 
carolyn, I really am sorry about that trip to Joshua tree.) thank you to 
my father-in-law, dennis o’connor, for many conversations and great 
ideas; and to my mother-in-law, Sylvia o’connor, for commiserating 
about the trials of book writing. thank you to Mo, for so many things, 
but especially for putting me up (and putting up with me) during Hur-
ricane Irene so that I could finish the epilogue without threat of power 
outages. And thank you to my parents, Jim and Maureen Weatherall, 
for making all of this possible. there was a day, Mom, in July 2010, 
when you sat on our couch in Irvine and shone with your unending 
optimism; if not for you that day, I would surely have given up. And 
dad, there was an evening in September 2011, at dinner at Saporito 
soon after you finished reading the first full draft. I have never been 
happier than I was that evening.
finally, and above all else, I am grateful to my wife, cailin. She has 
read every word of every draft of this book, from the initial proposal to 

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228 
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t h e p h y s i c s o f wa l l s t r e e t
the final bibliography. Which is fitting, because every one of them was 
written for her.

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1. introduction: of Quants and other demons
1 “Simons cuts a professorial figure . . .”: Simons declined to be interviewed for 
this book. Material on Simons and the history of renaissance is culled from several 
sources, including Peltz (2008), Greer (1996), Seed magazine (2006), Zuckerman (2005), 
Lux (2000), and Patterson (2010). Simons is unusually forthcoming (as compared to his 
usual reticence) about how he became a mathematician, and then how he moved from 
mathematics and physics into finance, in a public lecture he gave at MIt in 2010 (Si-
mons 2010); he describes his early contributions to mathematical physics and geometry 
in Zimmerman (2009).
2 “They called it Medallion . . .”: Ax won the cole Prize in 1967, and Simons won 
the veblen Prize in 1976.
2
“Over the next decade . . .”: the numbers on Medallion’s past returns are from 
Lux (2000) and Zuckerman (2005).
2
“Compare this to Berkshire Hathaway . . .”: these numbers are from the 2010 
Berkshire Hathaway annual report (Buffett 2010). the year 2010 is the most recent year 
for which data are available.
2