David Seetapun is an English logician, investment banker and fisherman.
[edit]Biography
He received a PhD in logics from Cambridge in 1991, under Robert I. Soare,
the topic was "Contributions to recursion theory".[1][2] During the fall of
1990, Seetapun was said to have "'used a very interesting 0'"- priority
argument to prove that every r.e. degree 0 < a < 0' is locally noncappable,
namely (35) (Va) o < a < o' (3c) a < c (Vb) b < c[anb = 0 => b = 0".[3] He
went on to a post-doctoral position at Berkeley where in 1995 he published
an influential article with his post-doctoral adviser Theodore Slaman on the
topic of Ramsey's theorem.[4][5] He also proposed the socalled "Seetapun
Enigma", a mathematical puzzle that was not solved until 2010 by Chinese
undergraduate student Liu Lu. After graduating he took a job for Credit
Suisse, but was offered a job by Goldman Sachs. 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".[6] He left
Goldman in March 1998, when he was rehired by Credit Suisse.[4] In 1998 his
models started to fail causing a loss of some 100 million dollars of his own
funds as well as for the firm.[6] He was dismissed and went first to Las
Vegas to live as a gambler and later to Florida to work in the swordfish
fishing fleet. In 2006 he won the "Golden Fly Tarpon Tournament" in fly
fishing at Islamorada, Florida.[7][8][9]
