Daniel James Lightwing is a former mathematics child prodigy and co-founder of the London-based Internet/gambling business Castella Research, which uses high-frequency trading inspired methods to place bets on sports exchanges.
In 2006, he represented the United Kingdom at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he won a silver medal.
Lightwing started to gain more fame in China from 2016 onwards, particularly on the website Zhihu, where his articles written in Chinese, covering a broad range of topics had attracted over 170,000 followers within one year.
He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a Master of Arts degree in mathematics in 2009, as well as Peking University, where he studied computational linguistics.
In 2007, the British television documentary Beautiful Young Minds was broadcast by BBC Two, and described his medal-winning competition at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), as well as his connections with China.
Lightwing's professional career includes working at Google, and several gambling-related firms, before co-founding the London-based business Castella Research.
He was previously a developer for the London offices of Google, and was once recruited part-time as an IT and marketing manager for the Chinese company Greenland Group.