The whole world in a classroom

Living in a world of data, THEO PANAYIDES meets a top mathematician who is far from the stereotype

Let’s switch to ‘enikos’ – the more informal Greek, like the French ‘tu’ – is the first thing Theodoros Evgeniou says to me, meeting in the lobby of the Nicosia Hilton. He’s 42, with silver hair and a shrewd, sharp-eyed expression. He talks insanely fast, and doesn’t stand on ceremony. Our actual interview is in English but his Greek remains excellent, considering he left Greece at 17 and only goes back twice a year; then again, his second wife is Greek (the first was Japanese) so presumably he still gets some practice.

Does he ever think about going back to live? “I did think so in about 2005 for the last time, and not since,” he replies – though of course one should “never say never”, he adds rather tepidly, with the air of a necessary caveat.

Why won’t he go back?

“It’s hard to describe,” he says, faltering slightly for the one and only time in our conversation. “You get used to certain – certain levels of – of discourse, of mentality, I don’t know what the right words are. Of culture, of approach to thinking about problems, views of the world, diversity of people”. What he’d like to say, I suspect, is that Greece – for all its charms – is a small, homogeneous, rather Balkan, rather backward country, whereas he’s part of something greater: a globalised elite (a much-abused word, but it fits here) fully immersed in a world of ideas and technology, making his mark as a tenured professor at what’s “probably the most diverse place in the world, after the United Nations”.

That would be INSEAD, “the Business School for the World” like it says on his card, usually ranked in the top three business schools worldwide (the others being Harvard and London). Theodoros is Professor of Decision Sciences and Technology Management, and seems devoted to the institution – he’s here as a guest speaker at the annual business dinner hosted by INSEAD alumni in Cyprus – above all for its cosmopolitan nature. Even though it has a campus in France, where he lives (it’s in Fontainebleau, just outside Paris), INSEAD isn’t a French school: it has other campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, and a student body where no nationality can claim more than about 10 per cent. Almost every nationality is represented – “and most of the people there have two nationalities, speak three languages, have lived in five different places. It’s an amazing environment, you see the whole world in the classroom, basically. You know, I’m a strong believer in the value of diversity. If there is one religion, it’s the religion of diversity”.

Five years ago, even two years ago, that kind of talk was the new orthodoxy, the unstoppable march of globalisation. Nowadays, however, it’s merely one side in a growing divide. Brexit was a shocking cry of protest against supra-national forces (the EU, in that case), while Trumpism in America and anti-migrant parties in Europe call for more wall-building and less diversity. There’s also a growing sense of anger against the so-called ‘one per cent’ – and Theodoros’ work is intimately involved with the one per cent, especially his current work which studies financial markets.

His main weapon has always been data. At MIT, back in the 90s, he worked on machine learning and computer vision, the technology now being used in driverless cars (coming soon to a showroom near you!). The point was to make a computer understand “what’s a person, what’s a road sign, what’s a cat, what’s a dog” – and the basic method was to keep feeding it images, like a baby learning by examples. Nowadays he does something similar, looking at the inefficiencies of financial markets and teaching computers to recognise “market anomalies” – once again, by feeding them data. Just as those 90s machines learned to recognise cats, the new ones learn to recognise arbitrage opportunities – arbitrage being, for instance, the study of two investments which you’d expect to be valued similarly (e.g. the same multinational trading on two different stock markets), spotting when they diverge and investing accordingly, on the expectation that they’re likely to converge soon.

Needless to say, the benefits from this kind of research are reaped primarily by financial companies – and indeed by the bigger companies which have access to cutting-edge technology, i.e. the one per cent of the one per cent. Maybe, says Theodoros, but it’s not so simple. It’s like when a scientist in a biology lab develops a new drug: the financial benefits go to the pharmaceutical companies, but the ultimate benefit goes to the people. His own research may benefit corporations – but it also ends up making markets better-run and more efficient, which benefits the economy and therefore everybody.

Besides, there’s also a larger point, which is that – quite simply – we live in a world of data. Chiding scientists for working with so-called ‘Big Data’ is a fool’s errand: that particular genie has long since been released from its bottle. “I’ve seen companies using data based on how you use your mobile phone,” he tells me – thus, for instance, a bank analysing the creditworthiness of someone seeking a loan by checking if they use their phone “in ways which indicate that [they] have a job”. He’s seen companies using Facebook data, or data from personality tests. (Is such data freely available? “Some of it is. Some of it you have to have a partnership with a telecom company, or an internet company or a retailer.”) Simply put, modern institutions – the larger forces, the one per cent, call them what you will – use data all the time, with or without Theodoros’ research. Financial companies use “systematic trading strategies”, buying and selling stocks based on computer algorithms. Investment funds use satellite data tracking the global movement of tankers and other ships, “Google Maps-related data that tells you how trade is flowing in the economy”. This, for better or worse, is the world we live in.

Google Maps-related data on Theodoros’ own background takes us to Nea Moudania, a town of some 10,000 people on the shoulder of the westernmost ‘arm’ of Halkidiki. (The Google Maps photos look nice, with a Byzantine church and picturesque low buildings around a placid harbour.) That’s where he grew up, the son of two primary-school teachers, evincing an early talent for numbers. He went to Athens for the National Maths Olympiad and won a bronze medal, then to Sweden for the International Maths Olympiad in 1991 and won a bronze there too. Then to MIT for nine years of studies, culminating in a PhD on machine learning, then a brief stint at a start-up in Boston and finally INSEAD in January 2001, where he’s been ever since.

It sounds very settled, and indeed it’s a good life. He laughs when I ask about working hours: “As an academic, effectively your job is to think,” he notes wryly, “and it’s hard to tell when I think and when I don’t think”. He does have some teaching duties but it’s only a few hours a week, the rest being devoted to research. He doesn’t need a lab: “Nowadays everyone on the planet does the same thing, which is being in front of a computer”. If he needs computing power for some major number-crunching, he can always rent it ‘on the Cloud’. On the one hand, he never stops working: “I think, in the past 10 years, I haven’t had my laptop with me only for a few days, if ever. Even when I go on the beach, I have my laptop!”. On the other, he can live as he wants, blending research with consulting work, INSEAD committees, even an ongoing venture in the world of hedge funds. There’s a certain stereotype of a rigid maths whiz, probably cribbed from The Big Bang Theory; he doesn’t fit that stereotype.

‘Theos’ (the name on the business card) comes across with a good deal of charm; that should be noted, if it’s not clear already. He’s exactly the kind of person you’d want as guest speaker at your alumni event, not at all the kind of person you’d associate with a top mathematician. (The stereotype isn’t really true, he says mildly, though you do get “extreme cases” of eccentrics who are great with numbers and near-autistic with people.) I’d expected someone more introverted, maybe more awkward – someone who might plausibly have written research papers with titles like ‘On the V-gamma dimension for regression in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces’ and ‘Optimization Conjoint Models for Consumer Heterogeneity’ – but in fact he’s alert, penetrating, not without humour. He’s even a bon viveur.

“I’m Epicurean, to a large extent,” is how he puts it. “Largely because that’s when my mind thinks cleaner. I believe in the ancient Greek kind of approach, you know, healthy mind in a healthy body. So I like very good food, for example – I’m a foodie. I [also] go to exhibitions, I like Art in general. I have artist friends also”.

Does he have expensive tastes?

“We all have expensive tastes,” he laughs. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is to satisfy them!” Fortunately, money – the eternal bugbear of academics – is better in business schools, indeed Theodoros is a little embarrassed about making more than the majority of biologists doing research that could save human lives. “My honest answer is I’m split about this. But the market decides, and the current market prices are what they are.”

The market looms quite large in our conversation. “If you want a layman’s view of it, you can see the markets as the modern kings,” he claims at one point. “A long time ago, who would decide who’s going to get the money? The king! Well, why should the king decide? Now let’s everybody decide, by investing in what they believe is the right project. That’s the markets”. Those outside the system, of course (the old and poor, the Brexiteers and others who feel forgotten), will say that the markets are rigged – but those who understand this brave new world, like Theodoros, are bound to embrace it. He’s “a technological optimist”, he tells me, with a powerful faith in machines to deliver a better future. His taste in food is like his outlook on life, bold and forward-thinking: he talks of a recent revolution in Parisian dining, traditional cooking re-imagined, plus a restaurant in Seville run by a disciple of Ferran Adria (of El Bulli fame) where he once tried – and loved – molecular cuisine.

If I had to distil my impression of Theodoros Evgeniou in a single word, it might be ‘lightness’ – not in the sense of lightweight but a lightness of spirit, a restlessness. It’s there in the switch to ‘enikos’, it’s there in the torrent of words that comes out of his mouth, and it’s there in what he calls “my main hobby for the past 20 years” which is theatre acting – though only through classes and workshops, not actual stage productions (he doesn’t have time, he says). I can imagine him reaching for his laptop during a day at the beach, having just been struck by a new idea. I can imagine him talking to a Swede then a Mexican then a Nigerian at his diverse workplace, charmed by the mix of many small experiences as opposed to a single big experience. I can imagine him at the gym – he’s big on exercise, though he’s had to pause in the past year due to an issue with his leg – relishing the clarity of mind that comes with working out, and just the energy, the movement.

His work is like that too: not just the current focus on financial markets, but Decision Sciences in general – a kind of expansive data-driven psychology, aimed at understanding how people make economic decisions. “The soup has many ingredients,” seems to be his favourite phrase (he says it three times, in different contexts) and what he does is a kind of soup too, amassing many kinds of information – the more data points, the better – with himself as chef, savouring the mix and making sense of it, using it to figure out everything from utility functions to market anomalies. “The discussion we’ve had for the past hour,” he concludes, “went all over the place, and it was about trying to understand how the world functions. That’s what makes me tick”. Greece, I suspect – let alone Nea Moudania – is just not enough.