Why I am funding Bayeux Tapestry British Museum

To allow art to be seen and to change the lives of those who see it is one of the reasons I decided to sponsor the upcoming Bayeux tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. This 1000-year-old work of art, made in Canterbury but being transported from Normandy for a show in London, has the capacity to stop people in their tracks. As TS Eliot put it in ‘Four Quartets’, the seminal poem of the 20th century: “Time prevent and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past.”

When I was 11, my parents and I left Soviet Belarus to build a life in America. I did not understand it in these terms at the time, but I was living through history: the last years of one crumbling empire, a crossing to somewhere more open and buoyant, our lives remade by the decision to move. My parents were professional musicians; my father played the viola, and my mother was a pianist. Despite their talent and dedication, opportunities to perform in Belarus were limited, and the arts were poorly funded. They took an enormous risk moving to an unknown country, carrying almost nothing except a belief in education and the understanding that, while talented people exist everywhere, opportunity is scarce and fleeting. This inspired me to want to make more people gain inspiration, and nothing is more inspiring than great art.

As a young boy, I could not imagine what lay ahead. I only knew I did not want to leave my friends behind, many of whom I had made during long hours of chess played to fill the time while my parents practised. That crossing gave me a sense of history as something lived rather than studied: a force that acts on real people, uprooting them, reshaping what they believe is possible. We need not have worried as much as we did. Life in the US opened many doors. I pursued my interests in mathematics and science, began my career programming video games, and eventually entered the world of quantitative investing, founding my company in 2007. This career has been fascinating, but above all, it has enabled me to support causes I care deeply about.

Education is at the heart of it all. I would never have been able to build my company without the opportunity our family’s s journey created and the access I had to learning. My life mission has been to expand the dream we had when we came to America and to bring opportunity, access and possibility to the people and places where they might otherwise not exist.

I hope this might explain why the chance to support the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition captured my attention so immediately. My field is about reading patterns in incomplete data, weighing probabilities, and acting intentionally under uncertainty. History, I came to believe, is most honestly told not through textbooks but through objects and decisions, and the records left by human hands. Bringing young people face to face with this extraordinary artefact will create a lasting impact.

The embroidery demonstrates such a mastery of craft, including in mathematics. The symmetries and proportions show careful calculation, suggesting relationships that later thinkers would formalise in ideas such as the Golden Ratio. Its chronological structure reveals something equally sophisticated: a modern sense of causality and sequence. Events build on one another, constrained by what came before. It is “systems thinking”, long before we had the language for it. It is a narrative about decisions made under uncertainty, about commitments entered into before their consequences can be known.

That language comes naturally to me, not least through my ongoing love of chess, which I continue to play seriously, and sponsor international competitions. Chess combines foresight, psychology and consequence within a bounded system: sixty-four squares with fixed rules but infinite variation. The Bayeux Tapestry’s embroidery operates on a similarly compelling logic. I see the same instinct at work in it: studying sequences, searching for patterns and thinking about optimal moves under constraint. That the makers are anonymous only deepens the achievement. The work itself is what matters: its precision, its focus, its enduring impact.

London holds a special place in my heart. It is home to one of my first international offices, and two of my children are studying here, enjoying all the city has to offer. The embroidery has survived because every generation that held it recognised something worth protecting. Our responsibility is to do the same.