Istvan Simon
Istvan (Steve) Simon has been very active since retiring from teaching at the Computer Science Department. He continued his research into Cryptography, after having been taught the subject by the very pioneers of Modern Cryptography. Professor Martin Hellman, the inventor of Public Key Cryptography, first taught Cryptography to Istvan at Stanford University, in the 1970's. Istvan's Ph.D. adviser at Stanford, Professor John T. Gill III, is another major contributor to the Science of Cryptography.
While still teaching, Istvan renewed his interest in Cryptography and took a course in applied Cryptography from another giant in this field, Professor Dan Boneh, the director of the Applied Cryptography Research Group at Stanford University. After taking this course with Dan Boneh, Istvan taught a course on Cryptography several times at the Computer Science Department of AVÀÇ, East Bay before he retired.
Istvan is an expert Java programmer. He was an enthusiastic adopter of Java when Java was born at Sun Microsystems. At the time, Istvan was teaching Object Oriented Programming in C++. C++ is an Object Oriented extension of C. Istvan recognized immediately the advantages of Java over C++, and switched the programming language he used in his course about Object Oriented Programming from C++ to Java.
An interesting current project of Istvan's is the programming behind TradeSoft. TradeSoft is being implemented in Java. TradeSoft is based on a theorem Istvan proved about the Stock Market in the 1990's. Istvan noticed that JNPR was a stock with very notable characteristics. JNPR is the ticker name for Juniper Networks. Istvan knew about Juniper Networks because of his interest in computer networks. It is a very innovative company, a competitor to CISCO.
What interested Istvan about JNPR is that though Juniper Networks was a great company, its stock was very volatile. JNPR typically changed price at least 2.5% every day. Istvan realized that this volatility could be exploited to make huge profits at the Stock Market.
Istvan proved a theorem about stock prices. He treated the stock price as a random variable. His theorem can be explained best by an example:
JNPR is currently trading around $32 per share. Suppose we invest $10,000 in JNPR stock. So we buy 312 shares of JNPR. Now we have 312 shares and $16 left in cash. Suppose that JNPR price goes up to $32.80. We sell our 312 shares at the new price, so now we have $10,249.60.
Suppose the next day, the stock goes down, and its new price is $31.20. We then buy 328 shares at the new price. We now have 328 shares and $16 in cash. The next day JNPR opens at $31.15 and seems to be losing more value. So we sell our 328 shares and we have now $10,233.20 in cash. The stock indeed loses value, and goes down to $30.65. We buy 333 shares back. We have 333 shares and $26.75 in cash.
What the example above shows is that if the stock goes up, we make a profit, and get more money. If the stock goes down, we get more shares for our money than before. We started out with $10,000 in cash. We bought 312 shares. In three days of trading, we now have 333 shares, and $26.75 in cash.
Suppose the next day the stock opens at $31.80 and seems to be going up. The stock indeed goes up to $32.69. We sell our 333 shares and now we have $10,912.52. In 4 days of trading we had a profit of $912.52 or 9.13%. an average of 2.2825 % per day. Suppose we can repeat this performance for a year of trading, let us say for 250 days. That would transform our $10,000 investment into 2.8 million dollars.
TradeSoft is a program that will trade automatically on the stock market, based on the above ideas.
Istvan is also very active in International Relations. In 2004 he married his wife in China. While in China, he noticed a web site with very interesting information about China.
The web site was directed by a Stanford University professor, Professor Ronald Hilton. Istvan wrote an e-mail to Professor Hilton, explaining that he was in China at the time, and made some observations about what he had seen in China. Professor Hilton wrote back immediately and invited Istvan to be a part of WAIS, the organization he was directing, which was behind the web site Istvan had stumbled on.
WAIS, is abbreviation of World Association of International Studies. Thus Istvan became a member of WAIS, where he is a frequent contributor to this date.
WAIS has members all over the world, in many countries, from China to Australia, Turkey, Japan, Portugal, Spain, USA, Italy, France, UK, Iran, Germany, etc. WAIS is very active on the current war in Ukraine, started by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022.
Istvan is a fairly good amateur violinist. He has a YouTube channel: were he pursues his interest in classical music.