Eric Ross Weinstein, born October 1965, is an American mathematical physicist, economist, and the managing director of Thiel Capital, one of Peter Thiel's investment firms. He also writes on investments, capitalism, science, and mathematics. Weinstein was born in Los Angeles, California. In 1985, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a university scholar, receiving his BS and MS degrees in mathematics. He then received his PhD in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1992. He held a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a National Science Foundation fellowship in the mathematics department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grantee in the Harvard Economics Department and National Bureau for Economic Research where he co-founded the Project on the Economics of Advanced Training with economist Richard Freeman.