John Overdeck turned an Olympiad silver medal into a machine-driven hedge fund
At 16, John Overdeck won a silver medal for the United States at the 1986 International Mathematical Olympiad in Poland. Fifteen years later he co-founded Two Sigma, a New York hedge fund that trades using machine learning, artificial intelligence and distributed computing. By 2019 Forbes put his fortune at 6.1 billion dollars.
Mathematics ran in the family. His father was a senior mathematician for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and his mother was a director of Computer Sciences Corporation. After Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland, Overdeck earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's in statistics at Stanford. He then worked as a managing director at the quantitative trading firm D.E. Shaw and as a vice president at Amazon.
He started Two Sigma in 2001 alongside David Siegel and Mark Pickard. Assets under management stood at 34.21 billion dollars in January 2015 and reached 41 billion by May 2017. Alongside its funds, the company makes markets, owns a reinsurance business in Bermuda and runs a venture capital arm, with offices in Houston, London and Hong Kong. Overdeck reported earnings of 375 million dollars in 2016, and the following March Forbes ranked him ninth among the highest-earning hedge fund managers.
Much of his public work centres on education. He chairs the National Museum of Mathematics on an acting basis, and in 2019 he placed third in its Masters Tournament, an event that raised almost a million dollars. He also serves as a trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study and as a director of the Robin Hood Foundation.
In 2011 he and his wife Laura, who founded Bedtime Math, set up the Overdeck Family Foundation to fund STEM teaching and education research. It pledged 3 million dollars in 2018 to Opportunity Insights, a Harvard institute tracking how a child's hometown shapes the odds of escaping poverty, and has backed Khan Academy and the Harlem Children's Zone.
Source: John Overdeck
