Title: Eugene McDermott Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Co-director, Center for Biological and Computational Learning Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I would say that personally I am very impressed by something which is outside the normal scientific publication network: it is the incredible performance achieved in predicting financial markets by a very small number of "quant" hedge funds. The best example is Renaissance, led by Jim Simon, a well-known mathematician. Medallion - the flagship fund of Renaissance - has an incredible track record since '89, with a god-like Sharpe ratio of 7 in the last couple of years.
