Publisher Description

In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory--the basis of computers and the Internet--to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible. Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the "Kelly formula" to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp used the Kelly system with his phenomenally successful hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners. Shannon became a successful investor, too, topping even Warren Buffett's rate of return. Fortune's Formula traces how the Kelly formula sparked controversy even as it made fortunes at racetracks, casinos, and trading desks. It reveals the dark side of this alluring scheme, which is founded on exploiting an insider's edge. Shannon believed it was possible for a smart investor to beat the market--and William Poundstone's Fortune's Formula will convince you that he was right.

Author Biography

William Poundstone is the bestselling author of several nonfiction books, including Labyrinths of Reason and The Recursive Universe.

Review

"Seldom have true crime and smart math been blended together so engagingly." --The Wall Street Journal "An amazing story that gives a big idea the needed star treatment . . . Fortune's Formula will appeal to readers of such books as Peter L. Bernstein's Against the Gods, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, and Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed. All try to explain why smart people take stupid risks. Poundstone goes them one better by showing how hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, for one, could have avoided disaster by following the Kelly method." --Business Week (four stars) "'Fortune's Formula' may be the world's first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke book in a single volume. Poundstone comes across as the best college professor you ever hand, someone who can turn almost any technical topic into an entertaining and zesty lecture." --The New York Times Book Review

Long Description

Azinger's series is fast-paced action-packed fantasy. Kingdoms and characters come alive as they are woven together through twisting plots, surprising and delighting the reader with each chapter.In a world of forgotten magic, the kingdoms of Erdhe are nothing more than a chessboard for the gods. The players are being positioned for an epic struggle where lives, loves and crowns hang in the balance, yet few mortals understand the rules.In this game of power, pawns of light and darkness will make the difference in the battle for the future of the world: Katherine, 'The Imp': a young princess with the stout heart of a warrior will challenge the minions of a thousand-year-old evil. Liandra: The Spider Queen; who uses her beauty to beguile, her spies to foresee, and her gold to control, will need all of her skill and strength to fight a rebellion with her own blood at it's heart. Magda, a silver-haired grandmother who has been stripped of all she holds dear will be underestimated in the fight against a false religion. Cereus, an oracle priestess, will ply her powers of dark magic and seduction in her quest for immortality. Steffan, the puppeteer, will corrupt the innocent and unwary with greed and desire, as he sets fire to an entire kingdom.

Review Quote

"Seldom have true crime and smart math been blended together so engagingly." --The Wall Street Journal "An amazing story that gives a big idea the needed star treatment . . .Fortune's Formulawill appeal to readers of such books as Peter L. Bernstein'sAgainst the Gods, Nassim Nicholas Taleb'sFooled by Randomness, and Roger Lowenstein'sWhen Genius Failed. All try to explain why smart people take stupid risks. Poundstone goes them one better by showing how hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, for one, could have avoided disaster by following the Kelly method." --Business Week(four stars) "'Fortune's Formula' may be the world's first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke book in a single volume. Poundstone comes across as the best college professor you ever hand, someone who can turn almost any technical topic into an entertaining and zesty lecture." -The New York Times Book Review

Excerpt from Book

Claude Shannon LIFE IS A GAMBLE. There are few sure things, least of all in the competitive world of academic recruitment. Claude Shannon was as close to a sure thing as existed. That is why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was prepared to do what was necessary to lure Shannon away from AT&T's Bell Labs, and why the institute was delighted when Shannon became a visiting professor in 1956. Shannon had done what practically no one else had done since the Renaissance. He had single-handedly invented an important new science. Shannon's information theory is an abstract science of communication that lies behind computers, the Internet, and all digital media. "It's said that it is one of the few times in history where somebody founded the field, asked all the right questions, and proved most of them and answered them all at once," noted Cornell's Toby Berger. "The moment I met him, Shannon became my model for what a scientist should be," said MIT's Marvin Minsky "Whatever came up, he engaged it with joy, and attacked it with some surprising resource-which might be some new kind of technical concept-or a hammer and saw with some scraps of wood." There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair-unfair to Shannon. Einstein's work had had virtually no effect on the life of the average human being. The consequences of Shannon's work were already being felt in the 1950s. In our digital age, people asked to characterize Shannon's achievement are apt to be at a loss for words. "It's like saying how much influence the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature," protested USC's Solomon W. Golomb. It was Shannon who had the idea that computers should compute using the now-familiar binary digits, 0's and 1's. He described how these binary numbers could be represented in electric circuits. A wire with an electrical impulse represents 1, and a wire without an impulse represents 0. This minimal code may convey words, pictures, audio, video, or any other information. Shannon may be counted among the two or three primary inventors of the electronic digital computer. But this was not Shannon's greatest accomplishment. Shannon's supreme opus, information theory, turned out to be one of those all-encompassing ideas that sweep up everything in history's path. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, scarcely a year went by without a digital "trend" that made Claude Shannon more relevant than ever. The transistor, the integrated circuit, mainframe computers, satellite communications, personal computers, fiberoptic cable, HDTV, mobile phones, virtual reality, DNA sequencing: In the nuts-and-bolts sense, Shannon had little or nothing to do with these inventions. From a broader perspective, the whole wired, and wireless, world was Shannon's legacy. It was this expansive view that was adopted by the army of journalists and pundits trying to make sense of the digital juggernaut. Shannon's reputation burgeoned. Largely on the strength of his groundbreaking 1948 paper establishing information theory, Shannon collected honorary degrees for the rest of his life. He kept the gowns on a revolving dry cleaner's rack he built in his house. Shannon was a hero to the space age and to the cyberpunk age. The digital revolution made Shannon's once-arcane bits and bytes as familiar to any household as watts and calories. But if a journalist or visitor asked what Shannon had been up to lately, answers were often elusive. "He wrote beautiful papers-when he wrote," explained MIT's Robert Fano, a longtime friend. "And he gave beautiful talks-when he gave a talk. But he hated to do it." In 1958 Shannon accepted a permanent appointment as professor of communication sciences and mathematics at MIT. Almost from his arrival, "Shannon became less active in appearances and in announcing new results," recalled MIT's famed economist Paul Samuelson. In fact Shannon taught at MIT for only a few semesters. "Claude's vision of teaching was to give a series of talks on research that no one else knew about," explained MIT information theorist Peter Elias. "But that pace was very demanding; in effect, he was coming up with a research paper every week." So after a few semesters Shannon informed the university that he didn't want to teach anymore. MIT had no problem with that. The university is one of the world's great research institutions. Shannon wasn't publishing much research, though. While his Bell Labs colleague John Nash may have had a beautiful mind, Shannon "had a very peculiar sort of mind," said David Slepian. Shannon's genius was like Leonardo's, skipping restlessly from one project to another, leaving few finished. Shannon was a perfectionist who did not like to publish unless every question had been answered and even the prose was flawless. Before he'd moved to MIT, Shannon had published seventy-eight scientific articles. From 1958 through 1974, he published only nine articles. In the following decade, before Alzheimer's disease ended his career all too decisively, the total published output of Claude Shannon consisted of a single article. It was on juggling. Shannon also worked on an article, never published, on Rubik's cube. The open secret at MIT was that one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century had all but stopped doing research-to play with toys. "Some wondered whether he was depressed," said Paul Samuelson. Others saw it as part of an almost pathologically self-effacing personality. "One unfamiliar with the man might easily assume that anyone who had made such an enormous impact must have been a promoter with a supersalesman-like personality," said mathematician Elwyn Berlekamp. "But such was not the case." Shannon was a shy, courteous man, seemingly without envy, spite, or ambition. Just about everyone who knew Shannon at all liked him. He was five feet ten, of thinnish good looks and natty dress. In late middle age he grew a neat beard that made him look even more distinguished. Shannon enjoyed Dixieland music. He could juggle four balls at once. He regretted that his hands were slightly smaller than avera≥ otherwise he might have managed five. Shannon described himself as an atheist and was outwardly apolitical. The only evidence of political sentiment I found in his papers, aside from the fact of his defense work, was a humorous poem he wrote on the Watergate scandal. Shannon spent much of his time with pencil in hand. He filled sheets of paper with mathematical equations, circuit diagrams, drafts of speeches he would give or papers he would never publish, possible rhymes for humorous verse, and eccentric memoranda to himself. One of the memos is a list of "Sometime Passions." It includes chess, unicycles, juggling, the stock market, genealogy, running, musical instruments, jazz, and "Descent to the demi-monde." The latter is tantalizingly unexplained. In one interview, Shannon spoke affectionately of seeing the dancers in the burlesque theater as a young man. At Bell Labs Shannon had been famous for riding a unicycle down the corridors. Characteristically, Claude was not content just to ride the unicycle. He had to master it with the cerebrum as well as the cerebellum, to devise a theory of unicycle riding. He wondered how small a unicycle could be and still be rideable. To find out, he constructed a succession of ever-tinier unicycles. The smallest was about eighteen inches high. No one could ride it. He built another unicycle whose wheel was purposely unbalanced to provide an extra challenge. An accomplishment that Shannon spoke of with satisfaction was riding a unicycle down the halls of Bell Labs while juggling. Shannon was born in Petoskey Michigan, on April 30, 1916. He grew up in nearby Gaylord, then a town of barely 3,000 people near the upper tip of Michigan's mitten. It was small enough that walking a few blocks would take the stroller out into the country. Shannon's father, also named Claude Elwood Shannon, had been a traveling salesman, furniture dealer, and undertaker before becoming a probate judge. He dabbled in real estate, building the "Shannon Block" of office buildings on Gaylord's Main Street. In 1909 the elder Shannon married the town's high school principal, Mabel Wolf. Judge Shannon turned fifty-four the year his son was born. He was a remote father who dutifully supplied his son with Erector sets and radio kits. There was inventing in the family blood. Thomas Edison was a distant relation. Shannon's grandfather was a farmer-inventor who designed an automatic washing machine. Claude built things with his hands, almost compulsively, from youth to old age. One project was a telegraph set to tap out messages to a boyhood friend. The friend's house was half a mile away. Shannon couldn't afford that length of wire. Then one day he realized that there were fences marking the property lines. The fences were made of barbed wire. Shannon connected telegraph keys to each end of the wire fence. It worked. This ability to see clean and elegant solutions to complex problems distinguished Shannon throughout his life. Shannon earned money as a messenger boy for Western Union. In 1936 he completed his bachelor of science at the University of Michigan. He had little notion of what he wanted to do next. He happened to see a postcard on the wall saying that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology needed someone to maintain its new computer, the Differential Analyzer. Shannon applied for the job. He met with the mac

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