When George Sugihara was seduced by German bankers, he was wooed with style. He was whisked from his San Diego lab to a swanky London hotel, where his room came with a personal butler. Then it was on to a country estate stocked with the finest food and wines. His suitor was a senior executive with Deutsche Bank, one of the worlds leading financial firms. One night, with a Cuban cigar in hand, the banker wrote ever-increasing monetary offers on a napkin. "It was remarkable," Sugihara recalls. By the mid-1990s, banks and investment houses had realized that academics skilled in mathematical modelling could help them to devise winning strategies with which to play the world's financial markets. Sugihara, who had built a formidable reputation among ecol-ogists by analysing the population dynamics of fish and plankton, was a prize catch. Deutsche Bank wanted him to apply those talents to its 'black-box project', a secret endeavour designed to predict the prices of various financial instruments.
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