Doyne Farmer, PhD

1978 Hertz Fellow
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Doyne Farmer, PhD, is a professor of mathematics and director of complexity economics for the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.

Doyne was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative trading firm sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006; he was their chief scientist from 1991–1999. During the eighties he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Oppenheimer Fellow and founded the Complex Systems Group.

Doyne began his career as part of the UC Santa Cruz Dynamical Systems Collective, a group of physics graduate students who did early research in what later was called “chaos theory”. During graduate school, Doyne, as a Hertz Fellow, led a group that designed and built the first wearable digital computers (which were used to beat the game of roulette).

"I literally would not have been able to finish graduate school without the Hertz Fellowship."
– J. Doyne Farmer

Graduate Studies

University of California, Santa Cruz
Physics
Order Within Chaos

Undergraduate Studies

Stanford University

Awards

2011, Humbolt Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

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