Pi
From: FabianMarconi (fmarconi@mit.edu)
Organization: MIT Media Lab
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 07:54:46 -0500
>> Does anyone know anything about Maximillian Cohen?

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. Somepeople 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.