Friends: Edward Thorp and Bill Gross

From 2006 MedicalNews: 
"Over the last few years, Sue and Bill Gross have developed a keen interest in health care and advances in stem cell research. Aware of their interest, the couple was invited to tour UCI's Reeve-Irvine Research Center last fall by their friends Edward Thorp, a founding UCI faculty member and pioneer in the field of quantitative finance, and attorney Paul Marx and his wife, Monica. The Grosses later became aware of Hans S. Keirstead, an associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology at UCI and one of the nation's pioneers in human embryonic stem cell research, after his work was featured on "60 Minutes" in February. The television news magazine described his use of a treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells to improve mobility in laboratory animals with spinal cord injuries."

"His (Bill Gross) roots, it turns out, are in Canada. Mr. Gross is a first-generation American, born in Ohio to parents originally from Winnipeg. His mother’s family farmed wheat in Manitoba; his father, an executive with a steel company, played hockey.

The path toward finance began with a near-death experience. A bad car accident in his final year in college sliced off much of his scalp. As he recuperated, he read a book which became a cult favourite among investors: Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorp, then a math professor.

The book detailed how to win at blackjack by using a system for counting cards. After Mr. Gross recovered, he hopped a freight train to Las Vegas. Over the next four months, playing 16 hours a day, he turned $200 into $10,000."
On Edward THorp:

"There are, however, a couple of hitches. Thorp opens his fund only once a year. Next opening will be in January, 1989. Secondly, he requires a minimum investment of $2 million, which obviously keeps out the paperhangers. ("To invest $2 million," he said, "requires a net worth of $10 million, which means about 4,000 people in this country.") Finally, even the $2 million isn't guaranteed to get you in the club. "If you bang on the door with that money next January," said Thorp matter-of-factly, "I'll be happy to wait-list you." Thorp comes across precisely the same whether he is talking about playing blackjack, running a marathon, investing multimillions in the stock market or winning a Tangletowns contest. Not just sincere, which would do him a disservice, but distressingly, dispassionately rational. Thorp's rather ordinary appearance-wiry, modest stature, offhand mien-makes the quicksilver elasticity of his mind even more startling, and, in an odd sort of way, warming.

His fascination with blackjack-which his associates had figured out was the commercial gambling game in which the house held the smallest edge over the player-started when he was a graduate student. He found that by using the system described in the statistical journal he could play all day on just a few dollars. That wasn't good enough, so when Thorp began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he taught himself to program a computer and poured into it several years of research relating to blackjack possibilities and probabilities. From that came a system that Thorp was convinced couldn't lose.

About this time, he met a New York City stockbroker named Jay Regan who was bored selling stock and wanted some of the action himself. So he and Thorp pooled their money and plunged. They haven't looked back since. They discovered that they could multiply their assets more quickly with a larger kitty, so they opened a limited partnership and began attracting outside money. Thorp quit his job at UCI and did the research and programmed the computers in Newport Beach. Regan-who, according to Thorp, "was a philosophy major at Dartmouth and has a good, intuitive understanding of things"-handles the accounting and trading out of Princeton, N.J."