Communist bookstores, jeans and sweatshirts, math "quants." Summers has his problems, I'm the first to admit. But he's also been caricatured. My husband was working at Harvard during a portion of Summers's tenure, and he was indeed disliked by a large segment of the humanities faculty, with reason (these are prima donnas who like to be listened to, and he wasn't great at listening to them). But the students loved him. He's a more complicated guy than things suggest.
Although he once compared finance to ketchup sales, Mr. Summers discussed job possibilities with Goldman Sachs, long considered the premier Wall Street bank, and with Citigroup, where Robert E. Rubin, Mr. Summers’s predecessor as Treasury secretary, had become a senior adviser.
Then a young Harvard graduate named Julius Gaudio, whom Mr. Summers had met at alumni events, raised another possibility: D. E. Shaw, where Mr. Gaudio is a managing director. As part of Shaw’s rigorous screening process — the firm accepts perhaps one out of every 500 applicants — Mr. Summers was asked to solve math puzzles. He passed, and the job was his.
In a rare interview, David E. Shaw, who founded the firm in 1988 above a communist book shop in Greenwich Village, put it simply: Mr. Summers is “a brilliant, brilliant guy.” That is from a former computer science professor at Columbia who now spends his time researching areas like treatments for cancer, while others run his hedge fund day-to-day.
D. E. Shaw does not like to talk about what goes on inside its modish headquarters near Times Square. There, esoteric trading strategies are imagined, sketched on whiteboards and modeled on supercomputers by an elite corps of math wizards and scientists, most of them unknown to the outside world.
It is nothing like a button-down Wall Street brokerage firm. Jeans, sweatshirts and sandals are common. The firm has not one, but two libraries, where textbooks on computer coding are stacked near academic finance journals dating to the 1960s. For a time, the décor included light bulbs strung from the ceiling on various lengths of wire, each determined by a computerized random-number generator.
t is a quicksilver business and wildly lucrative. Mr. Shaw is said to be worth $2.7 billion, and today his firm manages $30 billion.
At Shaw, Mr. Summers, the professor, was often the student. The arrogant personal style that turned off some Harvard colleagues seemed to evaporate, Shaw traders say. Mr. Summers immersed himself in dynamic hedging, Libor rates and other financial arcana.
He seemed to fit in among Shaw’s math-loving “quants,” as devotees of math-heavy quantitative investing are known. Traders joked that Mr. Summers was the first quant Treasury secretary because he had once ordered dollar bills to be printed with the transcendental number pi — 3.14159... — as the serial number.
“We could call or e-mail him anytime,” a former Shaw trader said. “He always asked me more questions than I could ask him. He would dig through my entire way of thinking.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/06summers.html?_r=1&ref=us
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