Re: Who is Max Cohen?

From           FabianMarconi (fmarconi@mit.edu)
Organization   MIT Media Lab
Date           Thu, 26 Mar 1998 07:54:46 -0500
Newsgroups     rec.sci.oc.pmi.math
Message-ID     <3.1415$132$1@news.mit.net>
References     1 2
Next     Pi Files 2

> Mbscribe wrote:
> RUMOUR CONTROL
>
>> Does anyone know anything about  Maximillian Cohen?  
I heard he is trying to crack the stock market, and may have crashed the 
DOW JONES mainframe at the beginning of the big Asian crash...any gossip?

 F Marconi on:

Ah, yes. Max Cohen is a real living legend in computer science, the renegade 
number theory genius who dropped out of Columbia ten years ago and 
has built a big homemade supercomputer in his apartment in NY Chinatown. 

His mission is to predict movements in the NY Stock Exchange. 
Cohen believes that  any  system complex 
enough to be "chaos" must have a natural order within it, and that 
this order can be cracked by number theory. I've heard he is getting close.

His senior thesis, in which he proposed the idea, was published by 
Horizon and became a sort of collector's item and running joke among 
Wall Street types. But last year, a stockbroker at Lancet-Percy somehow got 
hold of some of Cohen's stock picks and played the market with them...just 
before the big Asian downturn last year. Butterfly effect? You decide.

Cohen is also supposed to be a migraine sufferer, and very shy. Some
people say he is really crazy. I guess time
will tell if he's a genius or just another obsessed dropout.

If anyone knows more about Max Cohen or his work, tho, please let me know.






Last known photo of Cohen, at 17, the year he published his PhD:





F Marconi off

>>Who is Max Cohen?
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