Business Spectator – Hedge fund superstar David Harding has just made the biggest ever gift to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University: £20 million (more than $US30 million).
But why would anyone want to give away such a sum, even if they had the cash to spare? For Harding, one reason was to compensate for all the physicists his firm had “poached” from the world of science, he said, only partly joking: his firm, Winton Capital Management, employs over 90 researchers with PhDs or other higher degrees, in subjects ranging from extragalactic astrophysics through to artificial intelligence.
