George Zweig

American physicist who was a graduate student in physics at Caltech under Richard Feynman. Zweig pored over all the experimental data on known particles and proposed the existence of quarks Eric Weisstein's World of Physics independently of Gell-Mann and Ne'eman. Zweig continued to work in particle physics, both experimental and theoretical, as a professor at Caltech until the early 1970s. Zweig subsequently took up neurobiology, in particular studying sound. He investigated what happens to sound when it enters the ear, and how the brain maps sound onto the spatial dimensions of the cerebral cortex. This led to the discovery the continuous wavelet transform by Zweig in 1975. Zweig also developed the device known as the SigniScope, which simulates the response of the inner ear to speech. Zweig is president of Signition (which makes the SigniScope), and also continues his research in cochlear mechanics as a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1981, Zweig was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for his accomplishments in physics and neurobiology. In 1996, he was elected to the National Academy of Science. Mr. Zweig, born in Moscow to Jewish parents who emigrated to the U.S. shortly before World War II. He grew up in Detroit and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Zweig first turned to hedge funds as an investor while amassing a nest egg for his disabled daughter. In 2003, he interviewed for a job with East Setauket, N.Y.-based Renaissance, founded by former Cold War code breaker James Simons. Renaissance has achieved near-mythical status for the performance of its Medallion fund, which has averaged returns of more than 35% a year since the late 1980s through 2010. After seven years at Renaissance, where he said he developed a system that allowed the firm to trade certain instruments for the first time, Mr. Zweig signed the noncompete agreement with Renaissance. The day after Mr. Zweig’s agreement expired in 2014, Shane Haas, an old acquaintance, pitched him on starting a fund reliant on quantitative strategies, they said. Mr. Haas earlier was part of such a group at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., trading Goldman’s own money as part of a “proprietary trading” desk.