David Leinweber, Date of Birth
TweetDavid Leinweber
American computer scientist
Date of Birth: 14-Jun-1952
Profession: computer scientist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Gemini 
About David Leinweber
- David Leinweber heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Computational Research Division's Center for Innovative Financial Technology, created to help build a bridge between the computational science and financial markets communities.He was a Haas Fellow in Finance at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2008-2010. Dr.
- Leinweber graduated from MIT, in physics and computer science.
- He also has a Ph.D.
- in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.
- He came to Harvard planning to study computer graphics, but discovered that the computer graphics courses there were no longer being taught; his "de facto advisor", Harry R.
- Lewis, encouraged him to study more broadly, and he ended up taking financial mathematics courses from the Harvard Business School.
- Later, Lewis's connections with the RAND Corporation helped him find a place there as his first post-graduate employer.He wrote the book "Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets" (Wiley 2009). Leinweber is internationally known for ironically showing that S&P 500 could be "predicted" by demonstrating that the butter production in Bangladesh correlated with the S&P 500 with 75% accuracy from 1981-1993 (an R2 of 0.75); including American cheese production improved the illusory correlation to 95%, and including American and Bangladeshi sheep populations improved the fit to 99%.
- Leinweber thus illustrated, tongue in cheek, how indiscriminate data mining, overfitting, and even apophenia may affect market predictions.
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