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I wait with bated breath for them to be administered a slap on the wrist.

I've heard good things about it but I believe it's an evening program spread over two years.

http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/

It's designed to be a feeder program for their own M.Sc. -- i.e., if someone turns up wanting to enrol in their master's but has no math background except A level math, they'll be instructed to complete the diploma first. No ranking MFE program will accept it.

You won't get into ranking programs with this diploma.

Oxford, Imperial maybe, LSE, .... But if you're looking for placement and visa afterwards, it's rather dicey.

Most of the programs you've listed are worthless and the subsequent job prospects are zilch. Sorry for my words.

The figure for 65% actually sounds plausible -- but I wouldn't be surprised if it's even lower. Likewise the initial salary of $75,000 is believable. I don't wish to comment any more on U of M.

Presumably not enough applicants?

I don't know what the fees currently are for these two programs. U of M just cross off your list immediately -- you're wasting your time and money, converting hope and cash into dust and ash. With regard to UIUC, ask for placement rates, try to get a handle on where their graduates are going...

Though I have to say (with the utmost diffidence) that I have seen variants of this before (firm handshake, thank you note, finding out about the interviewer's company, suitably formal attire).

Something to keep in mind a propos the USA: you never get more than you pay for (though you may end up getting a great deal less in this nation of con men and hucksters). U of M is inexpensive for a reason: the program sucks. I doubt they can arrange decent internships or placements. Minneapolis...

On an individual basis, personal preparation gives an edge; on a university basis, academic program and career services gives a batch an edge; but the poor level of placements as a whole is a function only of a moribund job market. Or as another poster pointed out a week back, the jobs that are...

Then just get it out of the way to remove any lingering doubts with an admissions committee.

If you're worried about the TOEFL, you shouldn't even waste your time applying to a leading MFE program. Your communication skills will be crucially important once you finish any MFE program.

Agreed. Or go to a non-top school and turn hope and cash into dust and ash.

Not a question of prestige. Oxford and Cambridge have cachet. The issues are 1) bias against non-US trained because of a feeling they're not trained for the US market and 2) lack of an alumni network. In addition, applying from abroad is always more difficult than applying from within a country...

Access to their lectures, yes, but AFAIK, you can't earn an online math degree from MIT. The situation is very different to the UK, where you could (can?) earn credits from the Open University and during the final year can transfer to a proper university. Or you could (can?) earn an OU degree...

Seems neither is offering an online math degree. Is anyone offering an online math degree in the US?

They're indispensable for learning how to think and talk like a mathematician. "Quant," on the other hand, is a "floating signifier" -- it doesn't have a time-invariant definition. The financial world is continuing to change -- and therefore so too are the job categories.

It isn't. Overpriced US "education" is one big con. You can cover calc 1,2,3, ODE, linear algebra, basic probability by yourself without any disadvantage. Where you will start stumbling is the upper-division theory-heavy courses like real analysis. At its best, formal education means a gifted...

Not enough by way of course offerings. In decades past they've had courses on Galois theory and differential geometry. You can learn it in an incomplete fashion -- but to do it properly you need the prof to test you and to point out the flaws and holes in your reasoning (as shown in your...

The hurdle is getting past HR -- their computers, their algorithms, and the dullards who work there. Also, even if you get past them and are hired, the next place you apply to will still look at your application askance -- it will be unconventional. People doing the hiring like to play it safe...

Assuming you're serious, what's your math background right now? All the serious posters on this forum are autodidacts to varying extents -- they've learnt to read and study by themselves. But a formal structured academic program -- if done right -- does things one can't do by oneself. There's...

True. Over the years there have been at least two threads on this forum (to my knowledge) discussing whether Columbia's copious offerings are not cheapening their "brand name." In your position I'd probably opt for MIT.

Harvard is over-rated -- but that's what having a "brand name" means (i.e., a rep out of proportion to one's actual strength in teaching, research, or quality of degree).

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-woes-of-wall-street-why-young-bankers-are-so-miserable/283927/#ixzz2tyoF1TeF

This could be the subject of an extended discussion since I've been giving some thought to this. Finance has some tangential and tenuous connection to the real world (otherwise we may as well play the board game Monopoly). It's that real world -- peak oil and other disturbing things -- that's...

I think you're right. People are trying to equate these banker suicides to 1929, when (supposedly) many in Wall Street hurled themselves from ledges. In my opinion there will be another global financial implosion dwarfing that of 2008, and its epicentre will be the sagging USA. At that time we...

My question is: Is the figure really an anomaly? Or given that there are hundreds of thousands of people in finance, is the figure for suicides about usual? Are people trying to connect non-existent dots?

Is this the norm? http://intellihub.com/8th-international-banker-die-month-jumps-building-china/

It's only for b-schools, depts of finance and (to a lesser degree) depts of economics. Otherwise your figures are correct.

Foolish question.

Article in the Atlantic Monthly.

Too much dumped on the market too fast. With regard to shale oil, the US might peak by the end of this year -- and the fall-off will probably be rapid. We're not going back to the era of the Flintstones. One doesn't have to be a doom-and-gloomer to take a hard-eyed look at the energy future...

They're being pursued because renewables like wind, solar, and hydro can't take up the increasing slack being produced by the declining super-fields. Shale is a mirage in any case. In addition, the renewables depend on some assistance from fossil fuels for building and maintenance. And other...

The grad programs, where there's a big disconnect with the undergrad programs and many of the students come from abroad. It's an uneasy welding together of a 19th century English undergrad humanistic education (hence the stupid course requirements of lit, history and other baloney for science...

In the US system they keep tediously repeating the same material again and again. The best math undergrad students have typically taken AP calc, and at the BC level rather than the AB level. So they're spared the first two semesters of calc. Vector calc is what they'll start with followed by a...

In England, 18. But the undergrads are coming with "A" levels in pure math and one extra math (applied math or further math). They're already competent at differential and integral calculus. If they're not taking analysis in their first year, definitely in their second. Universities like Oxford...

There's nothing inherently difficult about it. It's just another quirk of the US system that it's consigned to the graduate curriculum.

He probably doesn't -- but it seems to me it's beside the point. The point he's made more than once is how we'll get by when the huge infrastructure needed to manufacture and support the use of advanced electronics is not around (manufacturing facilities for chips, trans-Pacific supply chains...

Thought-provoking essay by the Archdruid.

The Technion is Israel's MIT. It may be that Israelis are not applying to these MFE programs for some reason but US admissions committees should surely know the reputation of the Technion.

A review of the book in BAMS: http://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.bams/1183544086

Then you're missing H.H. Goldstine's A History of Numerical Analysis from the 16th through the 19th Century, published in 1977. Some used copies are floating around. The book should be acquired, stored in an armored vault and guarded with a shotgun. Easily worth its weight in silver, if not in gold.

It's an abridged version of the superior 2-volume "Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning" by the same author.

"Help to Buy" sums up the whole of the British government's economic policy. My sister-in-law has just bought a poky little terraced house in Ealing for 400,000 pounds. You can't rent forever.

There was a historically informed article in LRB a couple of weeks back: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n01/james-meek/where-will-we-live

British economic policy has only one goal: keep up house prices in London and the home counties.

You have to be earning a merchant banker's salary and bonus to afford even a terraced house in London.

What do you think?

Interesting. http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/

In the USA as a general rule, you never get more than what you pay for -- which means you can end up getting less than what you pay for if you're unwary. The cheaper programs should have alarm bells going off in your head -- why are they cheaper? The people flogging the programs are keenly aware...

Designed to lure in foreign students (locals won't be deceived). U of Hertfordshire used to be Hatfield Polytechnic until Major bumped up all the polys and made them unis.

Off on a tangent but we may need to re-learn these old skills again as our present era draws to a close. Some of those old skills will be calculating without computers: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/01/seven-sustainable-technologies.html

An old friend of mine wrote this:

No. CLRS is probably the book for that.

Both Amazon and abebooks have copies for sale. Noel Kalicharan's Data Structures in C is another possibility but in my opinion not so good.

Yes. The top book, the best book -- and one that probably no-one here knows about -- is Reema Thareja's Data Structures Using C, published by Oxford in India. First let me start with the bad points. 1) The paper used isn't great, 2) You have to check every page to see it's not missing (I...

I'm talking of enlisted men.

So-so. Usable but verbose, not really that well-organised.

There's definitely an argument to be made for a bijective correspondence. There's this dandy technique of fitting 13 people to 12 rooms in such a way that each has his own room, so perhaps the same can be done with four people and three rooms:

It's become so over the years. Even sharing an apartment can be problematic -- turf wars over the common areas, who does the cleaning, bringing over guests, maintaining the place generally, getting the rent cheque mailed on time, etc.

If it's an MSc for those who already have a BSc in computing, then there will be courses in things like compiler design, computability theory, complexity theory, etc. -- none of which you really need in QF. If it's one of those conversion course MScs, then the programming courses might -- just...

From the stance of QF these courses are a monumental waste of time. I was going to say the same things Daniel Duffy is. What one interested in QF should be doing is mastering basic skills really well. Using sheaf cohomology isn't one of them. And just taking all these courses will merely addle...

Off topic (OP, please excuse me), but the story goes that when Onassis was starting out as a young man, he used to rent out his bed for the time he wasn't using it.

The article is about humanities PhDs -- where to nick a phrase from Dante, it really is a case of "abandon hope, all ye who enter here." The situation is probably better for PhDs in the exact sciences -- but not much. There's a huge mismatch between supply and demand. And we should keep in mind...

Foreign PhD students in the US almost invariably have teaching assistantships and I think so do US students (at least in the sciences). But the academic job market is changing beyond all recognition -- few tenure-track openings and red-hot competition for the few that there are, teaching moving...

The PhDs being discussed here are those in the humanities but the points apply mutatis mutandis to those in the exact sciences as well. http://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/13/who-is-us-thoughts-on-the-mla/

Fair enough.

Another review of The Wolf of Wall Street:

Not to quibble but while I've argued they're well-written, I haven't said they're overly positive. Were I to engage in damage limitation, I couldn't write better reviews. Effective damage limitation means one has to acknowledge the points of the critics -- but then argue that they've been...

Personally I'd put Rutgers and UCLA as 2nd tier and Minnesota as not even that. The situation has become like law schools, where the majority of schools are lying about placements and starting salaries. Not blaming anyone, mind: the incentive to tell the unvarnished truth is non-existent in this...

Baruch, CMU, Cornell, Princeton, MIT, et cetera are all good. The only one I've spoken against is Minnesota. With regard to Toronto, I've just wondered at the spate of well-worded positive reviews that got posted in the wake of the OP's scathing review.

The dividing line is somewhat arbitrary.

They don't have the staff required for a serious program. And Minneapolis is a nothing place where quant jobs mostly don't exist. The real placement rates can't be what they say they are. The program -- I use the term loosely -- is designed to take the money of unwitting foreign students who...

Don't know about the U of Washington but agree with you about the U of Minnesota, which for years I've been saying is a complete con.

The posts written in favor of UoT's MMF are so well written I'm wondering if they're part of an orchestrated response to the OP as damage limitation.

I'm not saying your stance is devoid of merit but why would you want a place as a professional in finance if that is your outlook? The unspoken assumption of finance professionals is that there are underlying patterns.

A review of the film in the New Yorker.

I know there's a film thread here somewhere but I can't seem to find it. Here's a review of the recent The Wolf of Wall Street, written by a daughter of some mini-me Gordon Gekko.

Dmitry's forecast for 2014:

Pure math never tells the physics and engineering people they've been wrong -- in practice it always invents justifications for what they've invented and used on an ad-hoc basis. The Dirac delta function and the subsequent theory of distributions is a prime example. Feynman's condescending...

Not arguing for its own sake but a good essay is one which an admissions officer first skims with a glazed and bored eye (it really is tedious going through hundreds of mechanically produced essays written with the same faux enthusiasm and tired cliches), then realises there's something...

Bad analogy. Newspapers are ephemeral. If you ever get on the London Tube, the carriages are awash with copies of the Sun and Daily Mail. The same charge of ephemerality can be leveled against the garbage written by Tom Friedman and Dan Brown. Good books are forever, or at least for decades and...

And before them 5 1/4 inch floppies. None of this modern recording technology lasts. On the other hand, the school algebra book by Hall and Knight, which I used to teach my son (and which I grew up on myself) was published in 1899.

Silly question. What have you got to say? Say it, then trim the excess, tighten the structure, improve the flow and logic. Look at models of elegance and terseness like Bacon's essays.

The more primitive the technology, the more resilient it is. A century from now, if humans are still around, books will be there. I doubt any of this new-fangled technology will survive.

Didn't say it is badly written -- it seems to be written in the same slick style of pure math books -- definition-lemma-theorem-corollary. It's stupidly written. That style and that content is just the thing you don't need. Any time you hear terms like "sigma algebra," "Banach space," and so on...

Avoid the book. It is stupidly written. Get hold of books like Dan Stefanica's Primer for the Math of Financial Engineering, Luenberger's Investment Science, and Wilmott's Intro to Quant Finance.

There is another more controversial way of solving it. A state legislature (Indiana? Illinois?) attempted in the late 19th century to legislate the value of pi as 3. Suppose they had also legislated the value of e as 2. The question would then be to determine whether 2^3 was greater than 3^2.

It can be done more easily the way I'm suggesting, where pi/e and ln pi have to be compared. Just take the two corresponding functions x/e and ln x. Note that both coincide in value at x = e. Observe that the derivative of x/e is 1/e and derivative of ln x (for x > e) is 1/x; observe that for x>...

Interesting article in the WSJ (and I'm surprised they published it):

Well, if someone has really mastered "A" level math and further math, he or she should be able to do this or sketch a line of reasoning. The interviewers are trying to distinguish the sheep from the goats.

Going off-topic but this question has been asked at Oxford entrance interviews for undergrads. I "solved" it in a couple of minutes: take natural log on both sides and compare pi and e.ln pi. pi can be rewritten as e.(pi/e), which means we're essentially comparing pi/e and ln pi. A simple calc...

The process should be enjoyed, not just getting to the destination post-haste, breathlessly, and with only superficial mastery. I'd recommend a careful reading of Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery for starters, a book I read eons ago when the world was young. A synoposis can be found here:

Less haste, more speed. Aim to go slowly. Go for the older books which are now out of print and which have been erased from collective consciousness. For coding, start with C. Again, look for the older books that are now mostly out of print.

The Chinese are falling behind the Americans: http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-chinese-thirdgraders-falling-behind-us-high,31464/

Interesting article in yesterday's Guardian on work and pay conditions for retail bank employees in Britain:

Mechanics is one of the high points of Western civilisation, the ur-science par excellence. It grieves me to see it handled in mercenary fashion at American universities. But I digress: the point is the way in which serious subjects -- including stochastic calculus and coding -- are handled in...

What you mean is the book was assigned as reference and you had a week (or three lectures) devoted to Lagrangian dynamics, and the same one week for each of Hamiltonian dynamics, Hamilton-Jacobi theory, rigid body dynamics and so on.

It was a nod to the counterculture of the era, which was sick and tired of bourgeois hypocrisy and double standards. Of course there has to be middle-class security and affluence to be had for the taking before you opt to "rebel" against it. That era is gone and today's insecure and indebted...

I agree. Only a liberal arts graduate would think it's possible. To these types all higher math is just "calculus" (something that terrorises them). One topic which some of us were discussing in desultory fashion is that STEM types don't get laid. Something to do with their single-minded focus...

No problem with that: it's the same in math, the same in physics. The difference is that while, say, in grad school in math or physics, the students have seen the material before in more elementary fashion. The grad algebra course (or the grad mechanics course) assumes you've already taken an...

I agree. Ah, now there's the rub. All these things are being force-fed at an undigestible rate. They're being covered superficially. Too much too fast, and usually too superficially to be used with dexterity. Statistical theory by itself can be -- and is -- a master's degree in itself. Same...

The rankings are based on the "information" the programs supply. Since telling the truth often runs counter to the interests of those behind the programs (i.e., making money), they don't. I'd not be surprised if even some of the student reviews are not authentic. Information on placement rates...

Another bum program exposed.

There are other such programs, at least one of which is on Quantnet's list of top 25 programs. Postscript: So is Toronto, I just noticed. So much for rankings.

Dubliners is a bunch of short stories, and designed to give a flavor of Dublin. Portrait is a Bildungsroman written by an Irishman (just as Of Human Bondage is a Bildungsroman written by an Englishman). Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake just seem like abstruse and empty literary virtuosity -- "See how...

I managed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I managed Dubliners. I threw up my hands with Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. "History is bunk" (Henry Ford), and cited many times in Huxley's Brave New World.

Article by Ted Rall.

Amusing essay: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec13/Python-ate-job12-13.html

I agree with your logic. I don't see much of a difference between 300-student classes and MOOCs. They can probably each teach basic courses (such as calc and college algebra) equally poorly. For more advanced courses I think there may be a problem -- more interaction is an ideal, particularly...

Au contraire, mon ami: the long-term intention is to have MOOCs replace traditional courses. That's the idea. And while Coursera, Udacity, etc., are free right now, the idea is that eventually they'll charge for their offerings. Though thinking about this a bit more, you are technically correct...

Standardised low-quality junk food for the mind. Would you like a coke with your order, sir? Would you like to biggie size it?

That's how they get tenure. But they get corralled into teaching, which is often something they're no good at. And leaving aside a handful of places (Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago, and maybe three or four others), the math department's raison d'etre is teaching "calculus to morons." In this...

I don't understand the "hence" part. There are different kinds of thinking involved in math and quant finance -- unless it's very applied math like numerical analysis and optimisation. The math is the precise definition-lemma-theorem-corollary style; the quant finance is heuristic and focused...

Meaningless criterion. Quant math isn't research math. Carnegie-Mellon isn't on the radar screen with regard to its math department but has one of the strongest MFE programs around. Same for Baruch. Conversely, universities with strong math departments can (and frequently do) have shitty MFE...

It's not normally distributed -- but then it's meant only to sift out only the most promising. You do have a valid point that practice and innate ability are key, as in most everything else (which is why an IQ score by itself doesn't mean much except as an abstract potential).

Judit is the genius. A combination of innate ability and systematic training (the father is a genius of a teacher). We were having a discussion of this on a chess forum a couple of years back: my contention was that Hungarian Jews are the brightest ethnic group in the world (John von Neumann is...

I was thinking more of the math subject GRE (for admission to grad school in math), where of course you have to know your stuff -- but you have to be mentally agile as well. Or substitute something else if you wish -- like the Putnam or the Cambridge Part III exams.

You do but flatter me. I'm not in that league. But I have mixed with people vastly more capable than myself and I know there's an inherent difference. No they can't. As with any of the IQ tests, scores at the SAT/ACT/GRE can be improved by practice up to a certain limit. One can approach that...

The universities do it for them (in terms of taking people with high SATs, ACTs and GREs). And a quant/coding interview serves as an ersatz IQ test: the brainteasers and other problems posed test agility of mind and speed of response.

I don't think there's an agreed-on definition of "intelligence" -- so the IQ can't be a bad measure of it since it's undefined, vague, and fuzzy. The IQ is what you get when you take a particular test. Does it matter? It seems to matter to the US army, which has a cutoff of 85: they found it's...

If the others are quants, their IQs will probably be in the same range as well. My theory is that below a certain threshold (IQ 125?, IQ 130?), abstract thought isn't possible and only comes into its own after 140, or maybe 150.

Difficult to do in a language that's not your mother tongue. Try to get hold of a native English speaker, convey your ideas to him, and then have him or her put it in faultless English.

A cursory glance only reveals one spelling mistake but a plethora of grammar and usage mistakes. That's not the root problem, which is that you're not a native English speaker and your limited command is neither fluent nor idiomatic. Other than that, your personal statement is cliched and unfocused.

In that case, also take a look at Sean Dineen's Probability Theory in Finance.

Haven't seen Chung and Williams. Karatzas and Shreve and Revuz and Yor are standard monographs on stochastic analysis but turgid to read. Karatzas and Shreve is maybe a bit easier than Revuz and Yor. If you're talking from the viewpoint of finance, these books are going way too far and way too...

I agree. 'Course this takes time. The slender exposure to the B-S PDE and the Crank-Nicolson method (and maybe other finite difference methods) is neither here nor there.

Don't know about high level -- maybe if you're looking at Sobolev spaces and techniques from Hilbert space theory. But it does need time. I think typical MFE programs have one course on the Black-Scholes PDE, with a bare minimum of numerical methods to solve it. The same is true for stochastic...

*Snort of derision* -- to earn the PhD in the UK in three years, you have to hit the ground running. I've known many doctoral students whose grant money ran out after three years but who were still years away from producing a doctoral dissertation that would pass muster. If you're planning to do...

My guess is that the bozos at the helm of the company are a bunch of empty suits who don't know the first thing about coding. And they are liaising with a bunch of empty suits in the US government who also know nothing about coding. All the talk about working "24/7" to rectify the mistakes is so...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-web-sites-lead-contractor-employs-executives-from-troubled-it-company/2013/11/15/6e107e2e-487a-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story_3.html

There was a reason the US went off it: in the late '60s the current account deficits the country was incurring, and its loss of competitive position, convinced foreign holders of dollars that the currency might not hold its value. So they started cashing in dollars for gold. US gold reserves...

Never heard of it but I'm impressed with the wording on their site. Looks like their MFE is almost free: http://master.epfl.ch/financialissues But hey, that's Europe and not the venal skin-you-alive USA.

Persuasive essay in Jacobin.

This is patently not what I mean. What is the knowledge base and skill set every coder should have, regardless of what he works on? We have some idea of this in math -- hence the PhD qualifying exams. A PhD student who hasn't got real and complex analysis, algebra, and topology under his belt...

These are good and valid points. But the problem as I see it is that no-one has explicitly defined what coding competency is. In contrast, it can be defined for large chunks of math and for physics. If someone would bother to define it, then a road map could be constructed to get there. Just...

Neither beneficial nor detrimental -- just irrelevant. An acquaintance of mine completed a B.A. and part III in math from Cambridge, then completed a PhD in geometric topology from Liverpool. He just never cited his PhD when working in the City. The world of Donaldson and Witten is a world...

But today those senior managers need to understand the world of coding -- they need to have done coding at some point in their careers.

How minimal? Specify. A personal mentor with genuine insight. And some insightful books. No matter how you specify "minimal," it's going to take time, effort, good books, and at least one good teacher. Kahn, MOOCs, TED won't do the trick -- unless you already know what you're looking for. Even...

How could you take two undergrad courses on probability with neither of them being calc-based? An intro probability course at the undergrad level is always calc-based. And the Ruppert book is not difficult, as the previous poster pointed out.

True; that's the Faustian Pact between universities and PhD students. But from the way you describe your program it seems to have been hurriedly cobbled together.

*Sigh* -- sounds like another third-rate p.o.s. program cynically and quickly set up on a shoestring budget to make a bit of quick dosh.

It's pointers you want to learn to use with dexterity -- that's where C and C++ derive their power from. When you use "self-referential structures" in C/C++ to build linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, and so on, you have to use pointers with dexterity. That's a skill you want. You won't pick...

Then I'd toss a coin. If it was C/C++ based, I'd go for the structures and algos course. There are many C++ courses around but they're not going into any great depth and most of the "deep" books I see on C and C++ were written several years ago (i.e., they suggest going into depth in C/C++ is...

What's the language for the structures and algos course?

Winter is coming

Juris Doctor (law degree).

It doesn't get discussed on forums like this but the job market of ten years back isn't going to return. And even if it did there are so many quant graduates out there .... There is an interesting question about how long the world of finance itself is going to last before it implodes -- the...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/obama-contractors-obamacare-website-errors-software That's because none of these political shitheads, with room temperature IQs, knows the first thing about coding and computer systems.

The software failure is to my mind symptomatic of a broader incompetence of the US government as a whole. For instance I've recently approached the FDA a number of times on behalf of an overseas friend of mine interested in exporting his product to the USA. I can't get a single straight or...

Interesting article on the ACA fiasco.

Only if you already know how to code in a real language ( C or C++). You won't learn to code in C# and at some point you have to learn how to code.

Got 'em both. Good books. I also like Peter Duren's Invitation to Classical Analysis.

But how to go about learning it? I looked at the links Polter gave and read the first two (on the teaching of real analysis). I know virtually every book listed there. What's being discussed is not what to teach -- on which there seems to be a consensus -- but rather the most effective way of...

I don't think any active research mathematician does what he does for fame, and the odds of gaining such fame are staggeringly unfavorable. Other than the fame part, the level of ability among the best mathematicians is such that no merely ambitious mortal can hope to compete with them in...

At some stage an area of math has a tendency to become a glass bead game. The structure of post-war academia has encouraged this abstract and self-serving navel-gazing. This era is coming to an end. Courant foresaw this. Terence Tao has some insightful things to say on what makes good math. My...

There seem to be differing points of view. One is that of Hadamard, who thinks that intuitions should be translated into definitions, and then theorems will come out of them. On the other, people like (maybe) Ulam and Feynman, who were more at home with an intuitive and ad hoc style of thinking...

The math that's needed might be developed on an ad hoc basis. Something analogous to the Dirac delta function, which was initially created by physicists. Later on mathematicians developed the structure and machinery of the theory of distributions which legitimises/makes sense of such an ad hoc...

The existence/uniqueness part was an aberration of 20th century math. Most of that math (aka "pure") probably won't survive. As Courant put it sixty or seventy years ago, the only math that will survive will be the math connected to physics, biology, etc. -- applied/applicable math. The pure...

Pretty good essay. Never heard of this writer before.

And each of these -- real, complex, algebra, topology, Riemannian geometry -- will typically be year-long first-year graduate courses. And the grad students will usually have taken lighter versions of these as undergrads (e.g., Churchill for complex, Herstein for algebra). In the strong...

A decent math PhD takes some of your life force out of you. And PhD students are competing with one another because the jobs aren't there; it's literally a gladiatorial contest. This, incidentally, is also why quant recruitment is taking place among those holding PhDs: there's a large pool of...

No. I just think it's a bad first language. The ones I prefer are Scheme, Lisp, Python, and C. You can read more negative things about Java here and here. It is heavy for an undergrad program but if done properly it means one can hit the ground running in a graduate program. The good MFE...

NTNU is Norway's main science and engineering university. Oslo has a nice but small math department. Either will do for learning some serious math. I think there are four other universities in Norway but I know nothing about them. With regard to math, the dictum of "less haste, more speed" holds...

Are you at Oslo or at NTSU in Trondheim? And isn't your higher ed free so it's just a question of time and not of money?

http://www.karlremarks.com/2013/09/the-incredible-story-of-how-putin-used.html#sthash.nm386EDW.gbpl

Same as the law schools.

The authors claim no C++ prereq is required and glancing at the contents of the book I believe them: they'll teach you the necessary parts as you go along. If you want something to accompany the book try Allain's recent Jumping into C++.

No, not cramming. They just keep piling on the assignments and tests, which means fear and stress keep increasing. After a certain stage it becomes completely counter-productive. Much of the study material needs time, paced effort, and leisurely thought to assimilate properly -- just the things...

Well he, er, just sort of died, you know. In the old days: http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/

Mainland Europe is civilised. I've just come back from a vacation in Norway -- I doubt anyone even puts in an honest 8 hours there. But no-one has any stress there, no dysfunctionality. All the stress and anxiety begin the moment I'm back in the USA.

It seems putting in long hours -- irrespective of output -- has become a fetish, an end in itself. I bought a copy of Jonathan Crary's recent book, 24/7, a few weeks back. Here's a review of it in New Statesman: And another (more intellectually demanding) review here:

That's the thing -- what's the f***ing use of having them put in such long hours when productivity declines precipitously after a certain number of hours? The only thing one can do is automatic and mechanical things like operate the photocopier, make some coffee, etc.

Story in The Independent:

Both Gaddis and Horton are good. Either will do the trick for the purposes of computational finance. Sedgewick and Wayne also have a book on the subject, but it's more oriented towards algorithm analysis.

The existential anguish of having to make a decision is yours and it's easy for people like me to offer advice -- not my money, not my time. This caveat out of the way, what you've got on your side are your tender years -- you're still in your mid-20s. You have room to make risky decisions that...

Opinions vary. The one who has to decide is you. One point I want to add is that second-tier programs don't do a good job of teaching either (that's part of what makes them second-tier). These programs are offered and taken in a spirit of cynicism: the universities offering them want to make a...

After completing a second-tier program I doubt you will get a job better than the one you have already -- and as you say, you will have accumulated some serious and non-dischargeable debt.

Yes, and this will continue for reasons I don't want to go into on this forum. As long as there are takers, they will charge as much as they can get away with. When there aren't enough takers to break even, the programs will probably close rather than reduce the fees.

On what basis are you calling Minnesota "very solid?" Do you know the details of the program and their placement stats?

Fascinating interview with "Bifo" Berardi that might resonate with some quants. http://ced.berkeley.edu/bpj/2012/09/reactivating-the-social-body-in-insurrectionary-times-a-dialogue-with-franco-bifo-berardi/

They must surely be Brits, and probably take a perverse pride in not knowing a word of the local lingo ("I say, old chap, can't you understand a word of English?"). Used to see them in Spain all the time.

It is the same in Norway -- but the English they speak is stilted and formal and of course they don't speak it among themselves but only with utlending (foreigners) and as an andrespråk (second language) or even fremmedspråk (foreign language). If you really want to deal with them, it has to be...

Well, dunno about that; I can believe it for Poland, though. If you said that unemployment is higher in France or that there's more labor demand in certain categories in London, it might also make sense.

It's useful to know at least one other European language -- probably German or something close (like Dutch). France now seems to be joining Club Med so the romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian) are for losers. Pax Germanica is here to stay so may as well learn the language of the conquerors.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/Images/Thumbnails/1422/142263.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/picture-library/image.aspx?id%3D5209&h=395&w=522&sz=41&tbnid=zWNpYvf6Q4IReM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=120&zoom=1&usg=__IEKWYBIdYhbq83-cZUmyukDHIhc=&docid=fxNnTvi...

Interesting that they're using the Deitel text.

Don't think any member of the House of Windsor is employable. Mostly they function as high-ranking salesmen for Britain's aerospace and armaments industry. Doubt any of them have the brains to code. They do get automatic admission into Oxbridge, though.

The jobs are fewer and the pool of contenders larger. And one reason why the college-industrial complex is under stress: tuition continues to increase in real terms but the graduates of an increasing number of schools cannot find jobs. The link between academic credentials and subsequent...

Was it ever different?

That's what they do in the SF short story, The Marching Morons.

There's no "we." But I suppose if those of us here on this forum were to offer constructive criticism, one key point would be that high school and college freshman curricula and texts aren't what they used to be. Take a look at today's "college algebra" texts, for example. They're shockingly...

http://rense.com/general96/seriouscourses.html

Try Peter Passell's How to Read The Financial Pages -- but it is basic.

Who'd ever have thought it, eh? Not really. The CPI is as rigged as the unemployment figure. The dollar is losing purchasing power faster than the US government lets on with its rigged figures. By this logic the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic should also have been good for "economic...

http://printculture.com/the-future-of-the-university-a-vision/

C# has had it for years but this is not what I'm talking about -- I mean the formal lambda calculus and things like the Y combinator used to define recursion.