How he spends it

Pythonesque voice, he adds: “Do not approach your donor thinking that he is rich a n d yo u n e e d h i s mon e y therefore you will assert your moral supremacy.”

Some levit y c oul d be hel pf ul in those tense conversations bet ween the super-rich and the slightly poorer universities and museums on t he hu n t for a handout since public money became harder to come by. Harding, slender with wispy white hair and jutting chin, has been involved in plent y of them.

“All of the country’s institutions were told after the financial crisis, ‘Go and talk to the rich people’,” the Cambridge-educated physicist gently guffaws. “So many have done terribly reluctantly.”

Harding l e a ns in. “Many Bri t i sh institutions are just so grand that the idea that they should demean themselves by talking to the nouveau riche is paining. I feel for them — that they can’t conceal their contempt for the person who they are trying to shame into giving them money.”

Harding is unashamed by his success — and hates the notion of “giving back”. “It implies that everything I am doing to build the company is ‘taking’. I mean what kind of an attitude is that, that building a great British company is taking from soc iet y? I t ’s a mad outlook.”

But the financial crisis, from which his investment firm Winton Capital profited handsomely, tripped some feelings of guilt and a moral pressure to contribute more. “We had made a lot of money out of this disastrous time. It doesn’t make you feel like a goodie, does it?” he says, scrunching up his face.

At a cost of £5 million, Harding funded the new Dame Zaha Hadid-designed mathematics gallery at the Science Museum, which leading Londoners at the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 party on September 7 can glimpse for the first time.

“Who d o e s n’ t l ove the Science Museum? It hasn’t got enough money. I particularly approve of the way it has appointed Ian Blatchford as director because the scientists desperately need a non-scientist to sell their wares.” A similar sum went to the Francis Crick I n s t i t u t e , L o n d o n’s n e w medi c a l research facility. s o, ND then there is £1.25 million split between Westminster Abbey, the Globe Theatre and the Garden Bridge, and a not her £ 1 .75 m to Kew Gardens for alpine plant research in honour of his late father, who was the chief horticultural officer of the C o m m o n w e a l t h Wa r Graves Commission.

Compared with the Tates, Courtaulds and Carnegies of the past, this c e n t u r y ’s w e a l t h y donors are more likely to be hotshot financiers or tech s t ar s than i ndustri al i s t s . Fellow hedgie Sir Michael H i n t z e h a s b a c ke d the Natural Hi stor y Museum and Travelex founder Lloyd Dorfman underwrote the National Theatre revamp.

Harding has reserved the bulk of his spending so far for his a l m a m a t e r, Cambridge. Five years ago he donated £20 million to the Cavendish Laboratory because “all the money in physics goes either to the Large Hadron Collider or into outer space”.

His programme aims to attract the best talent to the UK to address the problems faced as a re sult of the world’s growing population, such as whether molecules be engineered to desalinate seawater or take up energy from the sun. Harding offers “no strings” money for so - c alled basic research — carried out with no thought to how it might be applied or commercialised — because “I believe the great breakthroughs have come from people following their noses, not trying to make a fortune”.

After Cambridge, where he was a p i n k- h a i r e d p u n k fan, Harding e s c h e we d a c a d e mi a in f avo u r o f making money, joining a stockbroker just as financial futures trading was opening up. With a pair of computer-programmer pals he figured out that markets were inefficient, emotional even, and devised algorithms to exploit that.

Their firm, AHL, was quickly sold to hedge-fund giant Man Group for $60 million so in 1997 Harding struck out on his own, setting up Winton, which is his middle name. At i t s H a mmer s mi t h o f f i c e there are flashes of fun on the g ro u n d floor — t wo Paddington Bear statues and ping pong tables — but most of the boffins crunching data are closeted upstairs.

Hi s f a s c i nat i on wi t h pro ba bi l i t y spurred his first major donation a decade ago, funding work into the public understanding of risk which has since expanded from Cambridge to Berlin. Harding fears doctors are no better at dealing with statistics than the average financier. When a patient is facing a life-changing decision, “what