Brilliant Professors
Apr 14 2008
Robert Engle
New York University
Biggest contribution: Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, or ARCH
Cocktail-party definition: A model for predicting risk in a financial portfolio.
Who's listening: Virtually every hedge fund, investment bank, and money manager on Wall Street uses Engle's model; it won him the Nobel Prize in 2003.
Janine Benyus
University of Montana
Biggest contribution: Biomimicry
Cocktail-party definition: Industrial applications based on designs in nature, like solar cells that can mimic the photosynthesis of plant leaves.
Who's listening: Boeing, General Electric, Herman Miller, and the North Face are clients of the Biomimicry Guild, which Benyus co-founded.
Tuomas Sandholm
Carnegie Mellon University
Biggest contribution: Combinatorial optimization
Cocktail-party definition: The algorithms behind enhanced business-to-business auction sites, which match buyers and sellers using more complex factors than just price (like shipping times, legal issues, and insurance limits).
Who's listening: Procter & Gamble, Siemens, the United States Postal Service, and Whirlpool have all bought goods and services through CombineNet, Sandholm's auction platform.
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