David Seetapun is an English logician and former investment banker.

Academic Work

During the fall of 1990, David Seetapun was said to have "used a very interesting 0′′′- priority argument to prove that every r.e.

degree Degree may refer to: As a unit of measurement * Degree (angle), a unit of angle measurement ** Degree of geographical latitude ** Degree of geographical longitude * Degree symbol (°), a notation used in science, engineering, and mathematics ...

0 < a < 0′ is locally noncappable, namely (∀a) 0 < a < 0′ (∃c) a < c (∀b) b < c ∩b = 0 => b = 0. Seetapun received a PhD in logic from

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

in 1991, the topic was "Contributions to recursion theory". He went on to a post-doctoral position at

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

where in 1995 he published an influential article with his post-doctoral adviser

Theodore Slaman Theodore Allen Slaman (born April 17, 1954) is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who works in recursion theory. Slaman and W. Hugh Woodin formulated the Bi-interpretability Conjecture for the Turing degrees, wh ...

applying reverse mathematics to Ramsey's theorem. He also proposed the so called "Seetapun Enigma", a mathematical puzzle that was not solved until 2010 by Chinese undergraduate student Liu Lu.

Banking

After leaving academia, he took a job for ''

Credit Suisse Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, it maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world and is one of the nine global " ...

'', but was offered a job by

Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, H ...

. Seetapun made a reputation for himself managing a trading venture with mathematical models, and has been cited as "Goldman's top London proprietary options trader", making over $500m. He left Goldman in March 1998, when he was rehired by ''Credit Suisse''. In 1998 his models started to fail causing a loss of his own funds as well as for the firm. He currently works at Waymo, which was formerly Google's self-driving car project.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Seetapun, David English logicians English philosophers English mathematicians Living people Alumni of the University of Cambridge University of California, Berkeley alumni Year of birth missing (living people)