Top 10 Quants Ranked by Google Search

Let’s find the top 10 quants ranked by Google. We start with a list of quants on Wikipedia and then google their name with additional key word “quant”. Then they are ranked by number of results returned by google search.

from selenium import webdriver 
import time

# Define Chrome options to open the window in maximized mode
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--start-maximized")

# Initialize the Chrome webdriver and open the URL
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
listurl= "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantitative_analysts"
driver.get(listurl)

quantelems=driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//*[@id="mw-content-text"]/div/ul/li/a[1]')
quantnames = []
for quantelem in quantelems:
    quantnames.append(quantelem.text)

googlecounts=[]
for quantname in quantnames:
    driver.get("https://www.google.com/search?q="+quantname+" quant")
    elem = driver.find_element_by_id("resultStats")
    googlecount_str = elem.text[:-15]
    googlecount=googlecount_str.replace(',', '')
    googlecount = [int(i) for i in googlecount.split() if i.isdigit()] 
    googlecounts.append(googlecount[0])
    print(quantname + " " + googlecount_str)
    time.sleep(2)
    

Kenneth Arrow About 187,000 results 
Louis Bachelier About 255,000 results 
Jacob Bernoulli About 78,900 results 
Fischer Black About 1,470,000 results 
Michael Brennan About 188,000 results 
Phelim Boyle About 10,600 results 
John Carrington Cox About 41,400 results 
Emanuel Derman About 25,900 results 
Richard A. Epstein About 216,000 results 
Eugene Fama About 59,700 results 
Victor Glushkov About 12,800 results 
Benjamin Graham About 574,000 results 
Myron J. Gordon About 45,100 results 
Robert Arthur Haugen About 634,000 results 
Thomas Ho About 9,580,000 results 
John C. Hull About 415,000 results 
Jonathan E. Ingersoll About 48,000 results 
Kiyoshi Itō About 198,000 results 
Robert A. Jarrow About 28,000 results 
John Kelly About 2,900,000 results 
Sang Bin Lee About 236,000 results 
Martin L. Leibowitz About 30,000 results 
Francis Longstaff About 44,200 results 
Frederick Macaulay About 299,000 results 
Harry Markowitz About 30,100 results 
Benoît Mandelbrot About 23,200 results 
Robert C. Merton About 116,000 results 
John von Neumann About 240,000 results 
Victor Niederhoffer About 16,800 results 
Stephen Ross About 709,000 results 
Mark Rubinstein About 440,000 results 
Myron Scholes About 73,700 results 
Eduardo Schwartz About 83,800 results 
Claude Shannon About 1,950,000 results 
William F. Sharpe About 124,000 results 
George Soros About 156,000 results 
Nassim Taleb About 46,300 results 
Thales About 258,000 results 
Ed Thorp About 39,300 results 
Alan White About 6,440,000 results 
Oldrich Vasicek About 7,630 results 
Cliff Asness About 18,900 results 
Jamil Baz About 7,340 results 
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud About 38,200 results 
Damiano Brigo About 20,800 results 
Aaron Brown About 933,000 results 
Gunduz Caginalp About 2,570 results 
Bill Chen About 1,910,000 results 
Neil Chriss About 9,180 results 
Jakša Cvitanić About 6,210 results 
Raphael Douady About 6,750 results 
Darrell Duffie About 50,700 results 
Bruno Dupire About 16,800 results 
Frank J. Fabozzi About 216,000 results 
J. Doyne Farmer About 19,300 results 
Jim Gatheral About 8,650 results 
Hélyette Geman About 15,500 results 
Kenneth C. Griffin About 245,000 results 
Patrick Hagan About 58,700 results 
Albert Hibbs About 15,100 results 
Farshid Jamshidian About 16,600 results 
Peter Jaeckel About 22,800 results 
Mark S. Joshi About 125,000 results 
Andrew Kalotay About 9,550 results 
Nicole El Karoui About 7,730 results 
Piotr Karasinski About 5,500 results 
Sheen T. Kassouf About 4,940 results 
David X. Li About 7,480,000 results 
Andrew Lo About 1,120,000 results 
David Luenberger About 102,000 results 
William Margrabe About 4,740 results 
Fabio Mercurio About 105,000 results 
Attilio Meucci About 17,300 results 
Salih Neftçi About 96,300 results 
Norman Packard About 595,000 results 
William Perraudin About 25,800 results 
Riccardo Rebonato About 19,100 results 
Isaak Russman About 37,800 results 
David E. Shaw About 556,000 results 
Peng Shige About 2,520 results 
Steven E. Shreve About 147,000 results 
James Harris Simons About 109,000 results 
William Toy About 633,000 results 
Stuart Turnbull About 70,500 results 
Paul Wilmott About 23,200 results 
Marc Yor About 48,500 results 

topten=[(x,y) for y,x in sorted(zip(googlecounts,quantnames),reverse=True)]
topten[:10]

[('Thomas Ho', 9580000),
 ('David X. Li', 7480000),
 ('Alan White', 6440000),
 ('John Kelly', 2900000),
 ('Claude Shannon', 1950000),
 ('Bill Chen', 1910000),
 ('Fischer Black', 1470000),
 ('Andrew Lo', 1120000),
 ('Aaron Brown', 933000),
 ('Stephen Ross', 709000)]

Conclusion

It turns out that quants with more common names tend to be ranked higher. A more elaborated ranking sceheme is needed and will be the focus of future work. See also a video generated from this project.

Written on August 18, 2019