David Shaw – Billionaire

A former computer science professor at Columbia University, David Shaw left academia for finance, doing a stint at Morgan Stanley before starting his own hedge fund firm D.E. Shaw, known for its use of sophisticated mathematical modeling and algorithms. Several of his firm’s senior executives have gone on to found their own multi-billion-dollar businesses, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Two Sigma’s John Overdeck. Shaw is now chief scientist at his eponymous computational biochemistry research firm.