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Pertinent article at Bloomberg today: Club Med will leave the Eurozone (but not the EU). The bailouts are just cosmetic measures to keep intact an unsustainable status quo. The German voter knows this. The Eurozone will be roughly Mittel Europa eventually.

New article in Der Spiegel. This suggests all kinds of consequences -- for the Eurozone, for world financial markets, for exchange controls (Greece will almost certainly have to impose such controls if it reintroduces the drachma).

Interesting article by Donald MacKenzie (author of "An Engine, Not a Camera") in the LRB.

Python is a functional language?

I couldn't agree with you more. I wanted to add a personal opinion or two of my own. The welding between the land masses of US high-school "education," undergrad ed, and grad programs is weak. And so frequently American college students have to take remedial math and English courses in college...

Give yourself back-up options, an escape hatch, so that you're not wedded exclusively to financial engineering. Thus you may be an expert statistician or an expert scientific programmer. It's not clear what will happen to financial engineering in the future and giving yourself extra options...

Yes, that is believable (as long as we are not talking of college level). Yes, but as Ilya pointed out, there are usually prerequisites for the courses -- prereqs that make no sense, just more stupid hoops to jump through. Also, there are distribution requirements -- you can't circumvent a...

Yes, but as a civil engineer you still need enough exposure to, say, chemistry, so that when a corrosion expert speaks to you, advises you, you can understand his analyses, arguments, and objections. Your one or two courses on chemistry will not make you a chemist nor learn how to "think like a...

This This is the 2010 University Challenge final, with Magdalen trouncing York. The point is that though the contenders are specialising in one subject at U they still happen to be polymaths -- which says something about their school education, and possibly also about the general level of...

Why not? European and British universities are doing just that: narrow technical education in math, physics, engineering. The stuff on who Stalin, Beria, Khrushchev, Trotsky were will have been covered in the 'O' and 'A' levels. Completely redundant and time-wasting at tertiary level to those...

Came across this:

Oh, I agree. DF was (is?) used for the intro course in AA at Chicago. It needs an adept lecturer to point out what's crucial and what's ancillary, and it needs capable students to be able to read and understand things for themselves. Personally, I like Rotman: it's more terse, more...

Continuing off-topic, Gallian is "AA for the not-too-bright." It's like an earlier text by Fraleigh but doesn't even go so far. Cosets are in Ch.8; the Sylow theorems and an all-too-brief 12-page intro to Galois theory have been shunted to the last section on special topics. For ambitious and...

There are differences. Not at the level of, say, courses on calculus, linear algebra, and elementary ODEs but at a more sophisticated level. Yike Lu wrote a post on this earlier in this thread that was bang on target. First-tier schools will have stronger upper-division and graduate courses than...

That's my opinion. I think the German and French universities just don't a hoot about the league tables, which are often made in the USA or UK and which are biased towards their universities. Not saying Harvard and MIT are not good; just that the differences in undergrad and even grad education...

Opinions vary. There are many negative things to say about Europe. There are some positive things to say about the USA. Like you say, affordable state schools is the way to go.

They are over-rated and European, Russian, and other schools under-rated. Who in government? Errand boys like Arne Duncan? Or some other corporate-vetted and -backed shill? The US state is increasingly a front for corporate interests: this is what you don't seem to be understanding. It is not...

Perhaps you are thinking of something like the CNAA in the UK, which existed from 1965 to 1992. The USA does not function this way, sadly: in areas such as education and social welfare the US state differs profoundly from European states.

Over the years the number of university-subsidised and -funded scholarships has gone down. Not exactly sure why -- universities like Harvard and Yale are sitting on tens of billions of dollars. The number of Pell grants awarded has also gone down. Also, because of the real rise in tuition fees...

Yeah, pretty depressing stuff. Again, it goes to the heart of the American system: private-sector "solutions" to collective needs. As the docu makes clear, there aren't enough places in state Us and CCs to take everyone (not to mention cutbacks in these institutions because of state budget...

Why should the US government, or the state governments, do this? There is no mass movement calling for it. There are, on the other hand, powerful forces calling for "deficit reduction" and "balancing the books." Nope, it's the state governments -- California, Michigan, etc. -- that have some...

It's not professors' salaries that are causing tuition fees to escalate into the clouds: in real terms full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty are probably being paid the same -- maybe even less -- than they were thirty years ago. Furthermore, such faculty are an ever-declining percentage of...

Three clicks from the site above got me to this case study PDF: http://www.vantagemedia.com/casestudy/casestudy_education.pdf For those who study "late capitalism" like myself, everything has been reified, commoditised and valorised. Specifically, the value of being able to lure gullible prey...

Meanwhile, a Yahoo "article" on degrees that are good investments.

Of course that's happening: the fast-track civil service jobs, the plum foreign office and MI5 jobs go to Oxbridge. So do the plum consultancy jobs. Oxbridge gives you a serious leg up. If you've gone to redbrick or plate glass, you can't compete. And of course contacts matter: if you come out...

Yes of course; these things have to be done the right way, with a bit of finesse. I can't just write a cheque and say, "Here, and make sure my son gets admitted." There is an exchange of "favors" taking place, some tacit understanding, some tact involved. It doesn't change the ground reality...

Money opens doors. Look at that son of Libyan leader Gaddafy, whose PhD thesis at LSE was written for him by supportive staff -- thanks to a 2m pound donation to LSE. Or the pal of Donald Trump who paid Harvard $2.5m (in some fashion) to get his son admitted. To be bright but poor can be a...

Numbers like $35k are still minute amounts for the rich. I keep getting email notifications from an agency in England that has private tutoring positions available in Russia, Greece, occasionally the USA, even India (once). They usually stipulate "Oxbridge graduate," occasionally with "public...

I think the argument in this piece (and others of its ilk) is subtly different: it is that universities advertise the (supposed) cachet of their degrees by convincing students they won't get hired without the imprimatur their certificate affords. To do this, the "college-industrial" racket...

Interesting essay:

Libraries are full of second-rate and third-rate books. You have to be careful in recommending books -- for the individual there is a big outlay involved. When Alain recommended "Baseball Hacks," I went and bought it, secure in the knowledge that he knows what he's talking about.

You are correct, sir. You can't weasel out of core courses in financial accounting, managerial accounting, managerial economics, general management, marketing, and organisational strategy. Most of these are vital to understanding how businesses work -- but useless from a quant point of view. In...

I like Strang's books -- particularly "Computational Science and Engineering."

I'm looking at my copy of Strang's "Linear Algebra and its Applications," which you wrote about in an earlier post (I have the 3rd edition). Cayley-Hamilton has been relegated to the exercises; there's no discussion I can see of the minimum polynomial; the discussion of the Spectral Theorem...

Looks like Britain is going the same way in terms of over-production of PhDs, commercialising higher and further education, raising tuition rates, and curtailing/ending basic research . The two differences I see are: 1) Not such use of starving adjunct faculty, and 2) lack of strip mall...

Excellent article on the travails of higher education in The Nation:

I'm sorry to hear this.

The first one is okay, and one of the better ones. However you will learn the basic constructs better from the fourth (Learning C# 3.0) as it doesn't try to be encylopedic and is oriented more towards newcomers. Jesse Liberty explains things clearly. If there are two books I would recommend...

Worth a glance: http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2011/04/23/

It's a very good book (I have the 2008 version rather than the even heftier 2010 one). But I would not recommend it to someone starting out on C#; as we say in English, "horses for courses." The problem is you get lost in an avalanche of detail when you're only trying to understand the core...

Which ones? Not all the ones recommended on this thread are good.

Yes, of course: C# was designed for the .NET environment. The only version of C# I know that runs outside the .NET environment is Mono C#. As you become more proficient with C#.NET, you will also become more knowledgeable about the .NET environment (for which there exist specialised books, if...

Suppose hypothetically interest rates were 2% and now become 5%. If previously I was willing to take a loan to buy a car or a new house, I now become more reluctant to do so. If I have money in the bank, there is now more incentive for me to save (rather than consume) as I get some return on my...

Vol.1 of Shreve can be read without a background in real analysis or measure theory. Vol.2 is at a different level of complexity. It is wise to study the binomial model -- the discrete case -- first. The continuous model of Vol.2 arises as a limiting case (as delta T --> 0) of the binomial...

Du er veldig flink! På engelsk: "Norway is for Norwegians only. Otherwise Norway is fine -- but the winter is too long." Jeg har vondt i vinteren. Og sommeren er altfor kort! Unnskyld, min norsk er så flytende -- jeg må praxis mer. Også jeg her glemt så mye norsk. Jeg elsker Norge for evig og...

U of Oslo has a math department; Norwegian Business School doesn't. Also in the area of computer languages, U of Oslo academics have written books that are known. If memory serves Norway has six main universities -- Oslo (the most prestigious), Bergen, Trondheim, Tromso, and I forget the other...

I've only visited the University of Oslo. The Norwegian Business School is a private school. I know nothing about it. For some reason Norwegian institutions don't have the same reputation Swedish ones do. The teaching will probably be competent though not inspired. I presume the scholarship...

Mea culpa: forgot to mention: 1) Simulation Techniques in Financial Risk Management, by Chan and Wong. Code is in SPlus but you should be able to run it in R. 2) Numerical Methods in Finance and Economics, by Brandimarte. Uses MatLab. This is just a beutiful book overall, to be guarded...

Yes, looks rotten; that's why I was asking. Oxbridge people get first crack at whatever plum jobs are out there and if they're struggling .... Used to be a time when getting a management consulting job wasn't difficult for Oxbridge (2:1 or better); how times have changed.

Black-Scholes is only a very small part of quant finance. Much more important are skills in statistics, numerical analysis and coding. Strong background in C/C++. Other languages like Python won't do you any harm. Things like MatLab and Excel as icing on the cake. Having done some coding for...

How bad is the job market?

If you get admitted to the Imperial 12-month MSc/DIC in theoretical physics, it would be worth doing. It is a first-rate program and will distinguish you from all the other physics graduates.

There should be some OR courses for you to take (linear programming, optimisation); there should be some stats courses; there should be at least one programming course; there should be the usual calculus and diff eq courses. Take all of them. It's not ideal but it's doable. Finally, nothing...

The simplest (and hence most accessible) one I know of is Ross's "Simulation." A more advanced -- yet still accessible -- treatment is Fishman's "A First Course in Monte Carlo." More advanced than this -- but more thorough -- is Robert and Casella's "Monte Carlo Statistical Methods."

Hmmm, that could be discussed. I don't know comparatively how difficult it is to get into medical school (vis-a-vis ranking FE programs) yet it seems to me that the programs don't test for high intelligence (because it's probably not needed). Or at least, they don't need the kind of intelligence...

Right you are.

Not sure but to avoid overlap, should not the second iterated integral be \(int_{x_1+h}^{1-nh-(x_1+h)}\)?

How do you know (that you are pretty intelligent)? On general grounds you would be advised not to make the switch. There's more involved than just taking a few courses. You will be competing with people who have lived and breathed math and programming for years, maybe since they were children...

f(x + delta(x)) = f(x) + f '(x)(delta(x))/1! + f ''(x)(delta(x)^2/2! + ... A triviality -- just replacing x with x + (delta(x)), a with x, and (x-a) with delta(x).

The point is the universities don't care about the fate of the PhDs they produce: all they see is a cheap, docile body of grad students, many of whom get poor supervision and end up spending unnecessary years upon years on their PhD (if they don't drop out in disgust). Of course the system is...

The suckers who spent several years earning a meretricious doctorate do. A friend of mine earnt his first degree from CalTech, then spent nine years on his PhD at Harvard. Now he's in a line of work that doesn't really require anything more than a basic degree. As I see it, the nine years were...

This is a review of an interesting new book, titled "Nowhere to Hide: The Great Financial Crisis and Challenges for Asia."

From the article:

A four-month-old article on PhDs in The Economist, along similar lines. And the Simpsons on grad students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0

*Sigh* Bernanke and the Fed are between a rock and a hard place. No good choices. Raise interest rates and the sigh of a shadow of a ghost of a recovery they keep trumpeting will promptly evaporate. Don't raise rates and the dollar keeps going down the tubes and the price of commodities --...

An article by Mark Taylor at Columbia: This article on the PhD factory, cited by Taylor, also is interesting reading.

Don't know, haven't seen it. I have a couple of Frank Fabozzi's books and he explains things lucidly (e.g., Fixed Income Mathematics). Not sure that this book of his on capital markets will be an exciting read, though. And pricey to boot. I'd give it a miss.

Try Alex Kuznetsov's "The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals."

Short article at Slashdot:

Yes, I know of it. As the BCS claims, the standard is equivalent to that of a British university honours degree. That's the rub. Outside of Britain it will probably not have much traction.

Difficult to think of anything offhand. I know micro- and macro-economics and to me it's redundant for a quant. It's nice but not necessary if a prospective quant has some basic accounting and financial exposure -- knows how to read financial statements, knows the rudiments of double-entry...

Take more programming and numerical analysis courses. Remember that it's not just a question of getting admitted but also getting through the program and then getting a job at the end of it -- a job that will probably involve serious coding. Kick out the micro- and macro-economics courses: it is...

They start at that much. After a few years of backbreaking work and inhumanly long hours, coupled maybe with some lucky breaks, it could be $250,000 - $300,000. Maybe more, depending on bonus. Who is saying that here?

The first few pages I've read make it sufficiently enticing for me to order a copy. The Hunza Valley in North Pakistan has been famous for the longevity of its people -- it's probably a mix of high altitude, vigorous exercise (because of the terrain), diet (low in meat), and lack of stress (a...

It's true that every blue-collar worker I talk to (in his forties and beyond) has something wrong with him: his back has given out, or his knees, or something else. If anything, the occupational hazards of blue-collar work seem to outweigh those of white-collar work (hardly surprising).

Not funny as the US dollar seems to be going the same way. For those who don't remember the great days of Weimar hyperinflation, a woman sat down to order a coffee at 5,000 marks; when it was time to pay the bill, it had gone up to 8,000 marks.

Some good stuff there -- it warms my heart to see it. Linear algebra and geometric algebra (the latter of which is conspicuously absent in US and British universities).

I loathe grading curves: it changes the exam from testing subject mastery into a competition among students themselves. In addition, there may be a grading curve -- but due to an incompetent teacher nothing much may have been taught. The grading curve disguises this. I much prefer a more...

Basic exam technique: eat all the low-lying fruit first (as fast as you can). Then strain one's neck for the higher-placed fruit, secure in the knowledge that at least one has passed and now it's an issue of getting the best score possible.

Section A questions will be to allow duffers like myself to get a passing grade (plug-and-chug problems that demonstrate basic understanding), while section B will be designed to separate the goats from the sheep.

The issue isn't the topics; it's the difficulty of the questions that get asked at exam time. For each of the topics mentioned it's possible to ask fairly straightforward questions that are "plug-and-chug." If -- as seems to be the case -- this course is meant for finance and economics types --...

My exams at King's (and Birkbeck) were also 2 hours, with six questions, each with two parts. But you only had to answer any four to get full marks, and just getting three completely correct got 75% of the marks, which was an A grade (As starting at 70%). For each question, the first part would...

Some of the questions are difficult, some routine. I hope in Singapore they're not using the same grading scheme of A = 90+, B= 80+, etc. This calc exam is assuming familiarity with Fourier analysis and vector analysis.

She was speechless.

Not sure it will make much of a difference. I feel we were meant to be moderately active through the day. Not just sitting or standing in place.

At my gym in the mornings I see all these young men and women who come in for a vigorous 60-minute or 90-minute workout (treadmill, elliptic machine, weights), then shower, put on their office clothes and go to clock in eight or nine hours in some sedentary office job. It can't be right to...

Yeah, probably.

In the Daily Mail:

You can try. You will have to be polite (England being what it is, being blunt won't get you anywhere). But you may not get the answers you want. If you ask IC why you should choose them over LSE, they may reply politely that perhaps LSE would suit you better (my guess). Ask them, rather, what...

Even bigger and better than before?

Pretty lame stuff. A washed-up has-been Gordon Gekko. For me it was "Wall Street" -- the fancy suits, the glitter and glamor, the big deals, the insider trading, the private jet .... Just kidding. My first exposure to the world of finance began with the novels of Paul Erdman -- "The Billion...

This needs to be elaborated a bit. They hired them only partly because of their math knowledge. They aso hired them because of the kind of math they knew, the way that they knew it (in a heuristic and rough-and-ready fashion rather than rigororous or -- even worse -- axiomatic way), because they...

I don't remember; I was responding to a post in someone else's thread. In essence, you'll be wasting your time and money. If you can get into Baruch, fine: Dan Stefanica has put time and effort into crafting some pertinent short courses. Also to keep in mind is that at a lot of these programs...

That can only help. There's no hurry. It's a question of playing what cards you have in your hand correctly. If you have such offers, accept one of them and work at the job for not one year but two. Your working for such organisations gives you credibility in the job market when you finish your...

Then -- assuming your pockets are deep, you've received no other offers, and that your world won't crash around your ears if you don't get a job in England -- go for Imperial.

Well, for what it's worth, here goes. London can be a fast-paced and unfriendly city for a newcomer (I've lived in and around London for 11 years and still find it so). The Imperial program, if it's any good, will be intensive and high-paced. The additional pressure of looking for a job in a...

I think I've commented enough on that particular program. ;)

As one teacher in the article points out, the relatively high pay is more than cancelled out by the high cost of living in such areas ($1.4m for the average property). The mass media keeps trumpeting 6-figure salaries as being upper-middle-class but I don't think $100,000 falls into that...

Is there a sufficiently large body of American students with the relevant undergrad degrees to avail themselves of this funding? Assuming there is, are there career opportunities that siphon off a chunk of them (for instance in engineering and computing)?

As a friend of the friends, there's only so much I can reveal about "this thing of ours" (Cosa Nostra). Omerta must be respected. Otherwise my padrone will be seriously displeased.

My memory fails but wasn't Joe Valachi the first ("The Valachi Papers")? Ah, but he wasn't a boss of any sort. My bad. Bigger and worse. The American mafia was/is stupid and backward (note that I'm not talking about the 23 Sicilian families in Sicily, which are a very different lot). As...

I think Mike Tyson made $130m during his career (which he's blown). People like Tiger Woods and Shaq O'Neal probably made comparable figures. Which working scientist has made a fraction of this? Or had a fraction of the glamor? How to convince the impressionable young to put in years of detailed...

Again off-topic but Jerry Capeci is known among the goombahs, wise-guys and "made men" in NYC. He's also authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia. There used to be a time when this, er, organisation, had a stranglehold on well-paid blue-collar work in NYC like garbage hauling and...

From Wiki:

Going off-topic, but it used to be free a decade back. I've corrected Jerry Capeci's articles on the site two or three times (grammatical or spelling errors). I've also told him that big-money crime has moved to other ethnicities (e.g., Colombians). But he never responded to this.

How does garbage hauling work in NYC? Is it no longer controlled by these fine gentlemen?

Hehe, commercials won't do the trick. Reminds me of the "Read!" posters I've seen in American schools figuring people like Shaq O'Neill holding an open book. Fat lot of good such empty exhortations do -- read why? read what? Anti-intellectualism -- if not actual pride in ignorance -- is part of...

"Sputnik moment" is now part of the idiom; it occurred when the Soviet Union launched its first earth-orbiting satellite in 1957. It was particularly galling for the Americans since they nicked most (all?) of the German rocket scientists (like von Braun). Intellectual work just isn't part of...

If you examine US curricula, textbooks, and the manner of teaching in American schools, you will be driven to the conclusion that they're designed to engender math phobia. In addition, for political reasons, the emphasis is on slow learners and not on providing fast learners with the extra...

Assuming you've already taking AP calculus (if you haven't, that raises questions), get through calculus 2-4 (if you took the BC version of AP calc, you may be exempted from calc 2). Take a course on linear algebra concurrently (which should at least get to the spectral theorem and Jordan and...

1) Finance or 2) Computational finance/financial engineering?

1) is a no-brainer.

Nope. I'm in the Midwest. Maybe there are regional variations.

All these varieties of English -- Indian, American, Australian, British -- differ. I'm not sure it's a question of "worse." For example, in the US it's common to say, "I'll be visiting with him," whereas in British English we either say, "I'll be visiting him" or "I'll be meeting him."

The problem is not learning the syntax of a language but learning how to use it to solve problems. If you take a class where tough coding problems are handed out as homework assignments -- problems that make you think, make you sweat, make you experiment -- it will be infinitely better than...

Another insightful essay by Charles Hugh Smith today here. I don't feel like giving any excerpt as I think it should be read in toto, but to whet readers' appetitites: Postscript: A piece in the NYT. I don't agree with the overall tenor as it's way too sanguine. But some pertinent comments:

I see the lingering effects of British colonialism in phraseology like this. Nothing wrong with it but it sounds strange to an American ear perhaps.

Any idea of title and publisher? Postscript: Found it: "Quantitative Finance: An Object-Oriented Approach in C++", Eric Schlogl, Chapman and Hall, and due at the end of this year.

It's a fine book: the pseudocode for binomial models, Monte Carlo simulation and interest rate models is all given. Interesting that this book appeared thirteen years ago and (as far as I know) hasn't been bettered since. Other books that integrate theory with code (or pseudocode) are Back's A...

It's ideal but perhaps not practical. It requires the algorithms and data structure courses CS students take, along with some exposure to scientific coding (based on a foundation of numerical analysis, for example in the book Numerical Recipes). Reason I'm bringing it up is the many times the...

Things pertaining to computing keep getting discussed here but to my knowledge no-one has ever asked precisely what coding skills and computing knowledge an MFE student or quant needs. I'm not talking in terms of a specific language (such as C++ or Python). I'm talking rather of coding skill and...

It pleases you to jest with us. With the exception of Baruch, they're all cash cows. As Sylvain Raynes pointed out in a piece published on this site a while back. Meanwhile, if you're predisposed towards BS (or just want to laugh your head off), here is a promo video from Kaplan U. I wonder why...

Everyone makes mistakes at the board. Ideally, some bright spark should point it out, the prof should correct his oversight/mistake, and life should move on. That's very different from the case where the prof doesn't have the most rudimentary handle on the subject matter -- and is using his...

This is veering off-topic but when many Pakistanis look at their shambles of a country, they say it would have been better if they had remained part of India. Pakistan is a failed state. India, for all its warts, is not in that category.

Unless the truth is exposed and critically discussed, things aren't going to improve. Like you, I don't see the benefit of sweeping the inconvenient truth under the rug. My parents and my uncles and aunts went through the Indian university system. Next door to me (in Chicago) lives my cousin...

You are correct, sir, and that is a legitimate point. As I've pointed out in an earlier post, Pakistan has no equivalent to the IITs and IIMs, or to JNU for social science research. And I forgot to mention the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research. My experience is mostly with Pakistan, and so...

No schadenfreude, amigo: I suffered through the same system myself for several years. It's written from painful personal experience.

McGruber, we're talking in detail about the Indian educational system. Post after post of yours is attacking me personally. Your posts are polluting this thread. You know nothing about the Indian system. You are posting horseshit here. If you have some animosity towards me, find some other venue...

Pakistan is in much worse shape than India: it has nothing comparable to the IITs and IIMs. Nor anything comparable to JNU, which is a hub for social science research. I've just been talking to an Indian academic friend of mine, who tells me the UGC has revised pay scales for profs, so the...

Bilkul apne sahee kaha, sahib. In logogn ko samajh he mey naheengh atha hey key in key des meh ho kya raha hey.

You're merely revealing your ignorance in area after area. I suggest you read something about the history of the place before you post on it, just as I suggest you read something about quant finance before you solemnly pontificate about what constitutes a quant program.

It's a large country so generalisation is fraught with hazard. IIT is the flagship institute and its graduates can be found in abundance in the US -- but that doesn't mean all Indian universities are even remotely at the same level. Instruction takes place in English -- a second language for...

No, mate. Nothing's been deleted. Perhaps you're wondering, then, about the vituperative attacks on me, instructing Andy that I be banned, excommunicated, and placed under the interdict? Beats me. Then the opportunistic McGruber -- who knows bugger all about the Indian education system, but is...

That's a racist comment, completely inappropriate and you should be banned forthwith. Funny how only Americans can be game for criticism but no-one else. Also, for tight, elegant code, Americans are still among the best in the world. Now if you want to talk about ill-documented spaghetti code ....

The thought police in action. No wonder critical questioning is verboten in India: it is mercilessly stamped out. Is this what you do with everyone who has a point of view dissimilar to yours? No wonder people in India never learn how to either entertain or debate with differing points of view...

Talk about ad hominem attacks. We're talking about educational systems in the Indian subcontinent, pal. We've critically discussed on this forum the Chinese and American systems more than once. Why is the Indian system taboo? Why the vehemence of the attacks on me if there isn't something rotten...

Cheers, mate. I'm an Indian myself. Amazing how many Indians insist on living in a state of denial and sticking their head in the sand. They should ask themselves how a tiny country like Israel, with 7m people, produces more Nobel Prize winners than India, with 1000m. The only people saying...

Two of my engineering friends were taught by this prof at different times (and since he never changed his lectures, I guess generations of students have learnt how sin x/x = 1 in this particular manner). I myself had the enduring misfortune to go through that system myself so I know what I'm...

Same in Pakistan (I've lived in both places). First problem is that older people -- including teachers ("ustaad") -- have to be given a degree of respect and deference they'e done nothing to deserve. And they cannot be questioned. The second problem is the proliferation of mass education in the...

A good piece in the WSJ on India's educational system. Pakistan next door is exactly the same, incidentally. One professor at the NED University of Engineering (in Karachi) was trying to explain the limit as x ->0 of sin x/x. First he cancelled the x's in the numerator and denominator; then he...

It was make-believe, politics as spectacle, political theatre.

But wait! There's more! Courses 5031 and 5032 are known as "Practitioner's Seminar": this euphemism allows the program to literally drag people -- er, "industry professionals" -- off the street to lecture the students. No teaching experience or savvy required. The programming courses -- 5091 and...

Some of the alumni already had those jobs before they started the "program."

For the U of M program, a review of the teaching performance of the gent teaching 5001 and 5011 in the fin math program can be found here: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1154438&page=1 (Pages 5 and 6 contain reviews of his teaching of 5001 and 5011). He is teaching things...

I'm not a grad of that program, Andy.

I've been thinking that places already living at bare subsistence levels might not be a bad bet: there are fewer things to go wrong and less complex inter-dependencies. High-tech societies need all sorts of complex inputs -- food, large amounts of water, transport, energy -- to stay aloft, and...

Yes, five minutes after I typed it, I realised it. I was just waiting to see if some smart-aleck would catch me. You and Dominic were odds-on favorites.

"Quantitative easing" describes much of economic policy in the US today; it is a key plank. More generally, unfettered credit expansion is a global phenomenon. Along related lines writes Charles Hugh Smith: The economic system -- of which quant finance is one integral aspect -- is unravelling...

This was in the Telegraph: The writer works for a fund that mostly invests in Russia. He's worked previously for the IMF. And written for the FT, among other papers. So his outlook has some credibility.

This video on the precariat looks interesting; it explains the changing structure of Western post-industrial societies. Its focus is on English cities (London, Swansea, Bath) but more or less the same situation holds in France, Italy, Holland, Japan, and the US.

1) PDEs is recommended. But to understand them, a prior exposure to ODEs is needed. 2) You need some serious programming exposure. C/Python/Ruby should do the trick. If it is mixed with some numerical analysis, that would be ideal. A bit of exposure to data structures and algorithms -- usually...

Maybe this one is meant to be a joke?

Interesting article in Fortune:

When elite player plays elite player, it's a mix of pattern recognition and intense computational analysis, at least in certain stages of the game -- past the opening and in the middlegame. Even here, there tend to be certain postions -- "critical positions," the "climax of the game" -- when...

For an example of raw ability -- the kind you can't BS your way around -- take a look at the last Melody Amber blindfold chess tournament in Monaco. Blindfold is when a player announces his moves and has his opponent's moves announced to him -- but has to hold the position in his mind, as no...

Okay, 105 then. You only need 135 for Mensa.

Ruth Lawrence has said she's not going to raise her children the way she was raised (i.e., in a hothouse, taking her 'A' levels at 11 and her degree at 14). Agree with the part on IQ. Went to my local Mensa society a few years ago and saw them all parading their high IQs (since they had no...

If you got stuck on de Rham cohomology at the age of 18, then perhaps you were being a bit harsh on yourself. Even Stokes' theorem in its proper version (i.e., using differential forms on manifolds) is quite respectable.

It's the logical culmination of vector calculus (via Stokes' theorem and differential forms).

What about de Rham cohomology?

Only 60. I'm still working on it. Don't tell anyone or they may institutionalise me.

In all these popular accounts ("He had an IQ of 8500 and learnt calculus while still in nappies"), they never specify how much calculus. Did he learn merely to mechanically differentiate a polynomial function? Or did he understand the differentiation and integration of transcendental functions...

Someone like Ruth Lawrence. Or Gauss. Or Kasparov and Bobby Fischer (in chess). People who exhibited extraordinary ability at a tender age (and had parents/guardians who recognised and nurtured that talent). That connection is made. And people like Einstein, Kant, Riemann are retrospectively...

There's no distinction between subjective and objective -- it's a false duality. Recognising it as false is one of the first steps on the path to wisdom and becoming savvy with money. Perception creates value. There is no objective "value" that exists distinct from perception. Gravity and...

Well, to give context, an example of a genuine prodigy was Ruth Lawrence, who earnt a double first (math, physics) from Oxford when she was 14, and then want on to complete a doctorate two or three years later with Atiyah as supervisor. Yet even in her case there has been no subsequent work at...

Schadenfreude would be where, say, they had genuine ability and then couldn't actualise it. But in these cases they are just media-created "geniuses," with little inherent talent, who promptly fade from view when there is something else to distract the public with. So there's no misfortune to...

He's supposed to have taught himself all this in a week at the age of 12 -- not attending some crash course. Though even in crash courses I wonder how much really sticks, how deep the understanding and developed the skill is. After a brief while these "prodigies" sink back into well-deserved...

No, of course not seriously. The story is tripe. Only interesting in the "gee, whiz" approach to (supposed) genius. Whoever learnt algebra+trig+calculus in a week?

It's been over twenty years since I read it, and it's a bit over 700 pages. I don't remember the argument he advanced. However, the book can be picked up used for a few cents at Amazon (plus $3.99 for shipping). My rough guess of his argument is that mature powers have a hub-and-spokes...

That mature powers shift from being innovation-driven to being wealth-driven was a point made by Paul Kennedy in his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which was published in the late '80s. It created a sensation both in the UK and US -- the US at the time was having some angst...

This should be good for a laugh. What a load of bollocks.

Wadhwa isn't saying anything new; nothing most of us don't already know. It's not the predatory nature of financial forms or the greed of engineering graduates that's the culprit; it's just the way the wind is blowing, as the economy becomes more "financialised" and industry becomes eviscerated...

What does that mean beyond the use of cliches and buzzwords? The "capitalism" in places like Russia is precisely what has created a class of multibillionaires, whose achievements to the national economy are questionable. In India, the per capita calorie intake has actually declined over the last...

There appears to be substantial overlap between his earlier "Statistics and Finance" (2004). One difference is he uses SAS and MatLab in the earlier text. The overlap is such it could have been published as a new edition of the earlier title.

Your statement that "it is not difficult for someone who has taken calculus and statistics" is wrong. You are playing with words. And what you are saying can give the wrong impression to someone who may be reading what you write. Shreve is demanding -- particularly volume 2. Shreve has...

You don't know what you're saying.

What would be a better way of doing it? More numbers, more statistics, more break-up by category? And out of genuine curiosity, where should the rhetorical punch come from? And for an unsolicited personal opinion, I don't think a "call for action" will lead anywhere -- something Petras...

Absorbing essay by James Petras. Before I get the usual flak for posting from a non-"credible source" or being a commie, let me hasten to add it's but an interesting perspective from Petras. The picture at the top of the essay must surely be that of Scrooge McDuck, the richest duck in the world...

There's legacy code in C++ and maybe some inertia among people as well that makes them partial towards it. But I see a strong argument for Python, including its add-ons, Scipy and Numpy.

Why?

Nothing wrong with OSU, by the way. At least compared to Purdue. It's not CMU or Cornell, but it's not a dump either.

Looks like everyone is trying to milk the quant training cash cow these days -- regardless of whether they have the facilities and expertise or not. I took a quick glance at their site, and with the caveat that appearances can sometimes be deceptive, this seems to be another third-rate me-too...

Oxbridge, Imperial, LSE -- the brand marks you for life and in the Third World means you belong to the ruling or technocratic elite.

Since this is whom the new legislation is directed against, we should scarcely be surprised. I don't know how large the quant market is in the UK but I have a hard time believing qualified local candidates are hard to come by.

I don't see what purpose attacking me serves. Many of the people going into serious quant programs have already taken general courses in ODEs, PDEs, statistics, linear programming, and numerical analysis in their math, physics and engineering programs. Now they come to see it applied to...

If memory serves, Baruch has five courses involving C++. You've got to be kidding that one C++ course is enough. They're being offered by other departments and are not an integrated part of the finance program. Ideally, students want to see PDEs and numerical analysis in the context of...

I don't think they can produce quants: their syllabus shows only one C++ course and none of the hard-core PDE and numerical analysis courses. By "leaders" they mean people who will fit into general financial administration positions (which could be more lucrative than quant positions). The...

I don't know how much to the right the Tories are. But they have an aging and reactionary voter base: all those vicious little old grannies out there in the home counties who don't want any more wogs, period. And they're egged on by Rupert Murdoch's papers. When they say non-EU students, it's...

Skilled workers like machinists, electricians, and mechanics are an aristocracy among skilled workers, and have their own subcultures. There's some sort of apprentice-journeyman-master hierarchy still in play. I socially mingle with some welders, electricians, and builders where I'm at, and I...

There's more to plumbing than fixing a broken toilet just as there's more to car mechanics than opening the bonnet. I don't know what I will do when my car mechanic retires -- they don't make his kind any more. It took a lenthy apprenticeship program (where among other things he was made to...

No, his usage is correct: it's "you're."

By definition I think a functional language is one which relies on the recursive definition of functions. Not that you are saying any different. Iteration and recursion are the workhorses of just about every programming language. The only exceptions might possibly be logic-based and/or dataflow...

Beaulieu is a good place to start. He uses MySQL. It's not sufficient but it's a good place to start.

At Yahoo.com:

If you want to understand probability, it is an excellent first book. Or to be used as supplementary reading. I think the second edition has been out for a few years (I have the first). It's written in discursive style rather than stacccato definition-lemma-theorem-corollary style and the author...

In the Daily Mail:

(Source)

I'm kidding about Friedman, of course; I consider him a complete twit. Among newspapers I don't think anything comes close to the FT. If nothing else, people might consider buying and reading the weekend paper edition. if nothing else, their English will become fluent.

I don't know how I'll manage without the perceptive analyses of Tom Friedman ....