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Hehe, I believe you. What's the inside dope on Galitsky? I suppose I could do a Google search but I'm sure I won't get the complete picture.

Interesting interview with Sergey Galitsky: http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4009981/meet-a-genuine-chess-billionaire-310513.aspx

That it's become such an expensive business encourages this kind of thinking. Even if one is genuinely interested in math and coding, one has to make sure to choose the right combinations, aim for the right grades, and not spend any time exploring and digressing into what one is curious about...

Of the ones who post here, probably few. Their aims are mercenary and they are overly anxious about how much their GPAs and letters of recommendation will impress admissions committees and/or employers. I suspect they have all the enthusiasm for math and coding that a toddler does for the...

Quite agree. This is one useful resource for those so inclined: http://www.gettingoutofamerica.com/

Amusing and probably very close to the truth (uncomfortably so): http://nplusonemag.com/can-venture-capital-deliver-on-the-promise-of-the-public-university

This is how difficult it to get an apprenticeship: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/29/jobs-m29.html

Many of the apprenticeship programs that used to exist fifty years ago have ceased to be. So now people have to get these 2-years associate degrees. Just about every for-profit has an aggressive recruiting campaign. In some cases recruiters have even been signing on the homeless and the...

Some of us were discussing this yesterday (including several marginally employed PhDs). If student loans were not available, the cost would not have increased so much. If students (or their families) had to scrimp and save to pay tuition, they'd be much more cost-conscious and colleges would be...

A post-doc where from the first day you're juggling your teaching duties, nourishing the frail plant of your research, and looking for the next post-doc (or maybe a tenure track job, though most don't have a snowball's chance in hell of landing one). I think I read somewhere that 40% of...

Why? What's the logic? A lot of the Soviet PhDs were working as cab drivers or petty traders. What was the use of sinking in so much resources (state), effort and time into creating specialists for whom there was no use? As I see it, the mad stampede for advanced credentials is playing in a...

As someone just pointed out, you can now supplement worthless bachelor's degrees with equally worthless master's degrees (aka "credential inflation")...

Not too bad when you compare to the bandits, er universities, of the USA.

The Mi Colchon Mattress video ad is quite well made. http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/2013/03/24/mattress-banking-rapidly-growing-industry/ Ah, it's here on YouTube:

How much today at the same uni?

Article at Yahoo:

I hear ABD gives employers the excuse to offer less by way of compensation. Going the last furlong and producing and defending a dissertation is likely to be useful.

I'd argue that this is because there's no conception of a future any more in the US and UK. So cynicism is rampant -- and that includes the cynical fashion in which commodified education is sold and "consumed." Speaking of the death of the future, incidentally, I'm reminded of Bifo Berardi's...

One problem of the grade-based system is it camouflages the absence of any deep or substantial learning. The instructor "grades by the curve" -- which tacitly propagates the illusion that something must have been taught, which a few mastered, many mastered to varying extents, and some mastered...

Reading this has persuaded me to read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

Okay, so you don't. If MOOCs are akin to texts, why have them? What's their purpose? Surely the purpose is to substitute for a flesh-and-blood teacher in front of you with whom you can interact? You're right that there's a similar problem with texts -- they have their uses but they shouldn't...

This thing is stomped on with jackboots. Intellectual curiosity presupposes an atmosphere of intellectual criticism and debate. Instead there's this obsession with the grade and the grade point average. Mustn't annoy the instructor -- he could pull one's grade down. You've got to go along to get...

Same problem of numbers in China and India (I've written about the abysmal standards in India on this forum in the past). But there's something additional operating in "higher education" in the USA: a McDonald's (or Walmart) model of standardising curricula, lecturing, and testing along with a...

But in Ireland, I presume? Not factory farm USA?

I'm not sure classroom learning is that much better in many cases -- if you're sitting in a class of a hundred or two hundred (not unusual in lower-division courses), your level of interaction is essentially nil. The whole commodified US system of education can be questioned. It is run on...

LBS has a fin math program?

A book not on the list doesn't mean it's a bad one. C++ Primer and Accelerated C++ are excellent books -- provided you already know something about coding. I'm not sure I'd recommend them to someone new to coding.

Then make that clear and explicit when you apply. The grades play a part because the admissions committee has little else to go on and thus relies on the GPA to judge whether a student will be successful in getting through the program. If there are mitigating circumstances, point them out and...

Probably not one that leads through high grades. Some people have a knack for getting high grades (often without really understanding the material properly); others don't (despite having genuine insight into the subject matter). If you're in the latter category, you need to rethink your approach...

The question should be the other way around: Do you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on some second-tier program with dicey employment prospects at the end? And a question a la Groucho Marx, who once remarked he never wanted to join a club that would accept people like him: Do you want...

From what I've seen the academic system in most countries is designed to reinforce class privileges and class divisions, not break them down via merit. Some outstanding students from the lower classes get admitted but the elite schools remain bastions of ruling-class privilege. A Kerry or GWB...

Your guess is as good as mine. I think in the next fifteen years or so, conventional second-tier US universities will be under increasing stress -- lower rates of state support, inexorably rising fees, and no jobs for their graduates will have an impact on student numbers to the extent that many...

I don't know whether more people are getting "educated"; certainly a lot more are getting credentialed. And the modern university seems to have been set up along the lines of an assembly line, taking standard inputs and producing standard outputs. We've become factory farm animals. The modern...

They won't die. They won't be any worse than the 300-student calculus classes. The problem is such classes are a travesty of true education, which involves more interaction between teacher and taught.

Well, why? A lot of the time they're busy chasing grant money. Or directing their "research." Or forced into educratic activity (meetings and so on). The ones who suffer are the students. That's why the quality of teaching at liberal arts colleges is ofttimes so superior to that at ranking...

Complex analysis is one of the most beautiful subjects around and even now, jaded and blase as I am in the autumn of my years, the theorems elicit gasps of wonder on my part. But when people ask in mercenary fashion what will please philistine admissions officers, what can I say?

Abstract algebra and complex analysis are probably redundant but still useful for developing that elusive "mathematical maturity." The problem with the applied courses is that though they may be more "relevant," you're always at risk of having no real theoretical understanding and merely having...

Riveting essay at The American Conservative.

Yep, large chunks of manufacturing have disappeared and I would think millions of manufacturing and technical services jobs. It is a bad thing. What kept Thatcher alive politically was North Sea oil.

A great leader -- Margaret Thatcher -- passed away a few days ago. She did much to make London a financial centre.

Ask them directly. If they hem and haw, you know there's a problem.

Try "C++ Programming: An Introduction" by Michael McMillan and "Numerical Methods in Finance with C++" by Capinski and Zastawniak.

Look at placement stats. The rest is irrelevant, merely window dressing.

Out of curiosity, is anyone here arguing that C++ is the ideal first language to learn? Just so that we're not talking at cross-purposes ....

Inertia. Intellectual slothfulness.

http://moreorlessbunk.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/they-can-hire-one-half-the-professoriate/

In my opinion as well, it's the wrong place to start. Barny's argument seems to be on target to me. Start with Python. In the last two or three years some phenomenally good books have been written on using Python for computation. The Guttag book is one, the Miller and Ranum one is another.

I think Python is the first language introduced at both CalTech and MIT. Speaking of which, John Guttag of MIT has a recent book out, titled "Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python: Spring 2013 Edition," published by MIT Press, which I recommend. What's happening on this...

They already are: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/25/cyprus-bailout-dijsselbloem-chaos-markets In a recent poll 49% of Germans -- I said Germans -- expressed fear the same could happen to their accounts...

Not from Cypriot banks, in which connection read this: http://coppolacomment.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-broken-euro.html Capital controls are back. In the longer term, Southern Europe will split away from Northern Europe (Germany, Austria, Benelux, Scandinavia, maybe France), which I've been...

The EU (i.e., Germany) has done the least possible -- just enough to avert meltdown but not remotely enough to tackle the problems properly. So they continue to fester. I don't know how long these temporary fixes will last before things get out of control.

Unfettered financial markets are a thing of the past and probably capital controls will be re-imposed (after a hiatus of decades).

A new blog post this morning: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/cyprus-sold/

EU guarantees deposits up to 100,000 euros. This was the Cypriot government trying to spread the pain to everyone to protect their Russian mafia friends with huge deposits in the Cypriot offshore tax haven. Anyway, a deal has been reached, which is close to the original EU/ECB recommendations...

Wasn't ECB's recommendation that all accounts be affected -- only the large ones. Decision to take money from all accounts was made solely by the Cypriot government, which it back-pedaled on after a day or two because of popular resistance. Cyprus is awash with hot (Russian) money.

Interesting article on One Hyde Park, its mysterious owners, and the changing face of Central London.

An absorbing interview with Michael Hudson:

Agree with your post (and avoided lectures like the plague myself in my time). To the extent that education is a social process, I think it happens on a one-to-one basis between a teacher and a student, unmediated by technology and bureaucracy.

Another stake through the heart of the undead vampire known as MOOCs: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/72-of-professors-who-teach-online-courses-dont-think-their-students-deserve-credit/

I agree and it's the same in math, the same in chess. We start with the simple things, build proficiency in them, then look at more elaborate, more nuanced, more baroque things later. We don't start teaching real analysis until we already know basic calculus -- we could but we would lose all...

That quants (and wannabe quants) are an amoral and irresponsible lot is beside the point. More germane is that quant thinking is irrelevant to the economic problems of this era. These problems are insoluble (leaving aside the point that quants don't give a rat's ass about them and are only...

Well, the Cypriot government is already backing away from penalising small depositors. Meanwhile my pal James Meadway wrote a good essay yesterday explaining the hidden agendas: http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/analysis/16345-cyprus-contagion-and-the-return-of-the-euro-crisis

A Londoner explains the Cyprus bank heist. Now why can't FE profs lecture with the same eloquence?

You're looking at the wrong kind of business, bud. No-one here (that I know of) has moral qualms about the rigging of financial markets. This rigging, in all its manifold aspects, is the only thing propping up the US economy.

It might not even be "legal." Actually legality has stopped having any meaning as the largest players don't get prosecuted no matter what they do (except slap-on-the-wrist fines).

There's no market in the USA that isn't rigged. If you consider it a waste of time, don't do it -- remain true to your principles. Everyone else here will continue doing it as long as they get paid or get a share of the swag. Moral lectures serve no purpose here.

The fin math has a couple of courses on stochastic; the quant finance one on econometrics. Both are light on coding.

The recent C# for Financial Markets by Duffy and Germani is very interesting. I got my copy only today but it will be another month or so before it's available in the USA.

A cartoon by Ted Rall (and a bit too close to the truth to laugh at): http://www.rall.com/rallblog/2013/02/27/fake-it-until-you-make-it

Don't get ensnared in the first place -- then you won't have to extricate yourself from it. It's a rigged game with the odds stacked against you.

It's a gamble. It would be nice to say that it is a calculated gamble but unfortunately it's difficult to calculate the odds. There are many good MFE programs graduating many strong MFEs. The number of jobs is limited. Everyone is trying to stand out from everyone else -- but how realistic is...

Campus jobs pay close to minimum wage and taking them is counterproductive: a good MFE is hard enough as it is, requiring all one's time and nervous energy. In general, "working your way through college" is extinct -- the tuition has spiraled into the stratosphere over the last few decades and...

No, of course not. It's a buyer's market -- and becoming ever more so. Since the buyers can stipulate a PhD and still attract lots of hungry and eager candidates, that's what they're doing. It will be scant consolation but it's occurring at all levels of the job market as the economy continues...

City U's program appears to be full time. And it doesn't seem to have enough coding in it either (just an elective or two in C++ and Visual Basic). Sod the brand name. Just ask for placement stats and where exactly the grads ended up at. I suspect all the programs -- LSE, King's, Birkbeck --...

Yes, the nexus of finance and coding is important to all F500 companies. An MFE who has skills in both (buttressed, perhaps, by courses in financial and cost accounting, and managerial finance) and knows how to sell what he to offer shouldn't have a problem. MBAs generally can't do hard-core coding.

An excerpt from the second link: And from the third: The argument isn't that undergrad education isn't gravely wanting (it generally is), but that online education -- touted both as a panacea for poor teaching and as a low-cost alternative -- is even worse. Techno-fetishism in education...

If there are thousands of students, the feedback is probably going to be something numerical (a series of questions that can be responded to on a spectrum of 1 to 5), which will then probably be statistically condensed ("the average response to this question was 2.78"). This is probably not a...

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) -- such as Udacity, Coursera, and so on -- have been discussed critically of late: http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/venture-capitals-massive-terrible-idea-for-the-future-of-college...

Why will the economy "bounce back?" It's the politicians and their tame economists who've been saying this is a cyclical downturn but there's no evidence for this. For the last five years I've consistently maintained this is a depression out of which there's no emerging. There has been an...

No it doesn't.

Maybe because 1) they don't speak French, and 2) the insular mentality of so many English people keeps then tethered to England come what may (though this doesn't convince even me as quite a few have migrated to warmer and sunnier Spain). I should point out that a contingent of French people has...

It ain't what it used to be. Look at what happened to 84 Charing Cross Road:

There's a film that describes what it's like for someone coming to England for the first time, titled Lucky Sunil, shown by the BBC in 1988. The protagonist, Sunil Sharma, gets admitted to "Queen Victoria College," which he and his family think is part of the U of London -- only to discover...

If we're talking about London specifically, it's become polarised in recent decades as on the one hand a place for the global rich (those with hot money or tax exiles) and on the other, as a place for the working (or unemployed) poor. As the FT notes in a recent article, "white flight" has been...

Ah, I see. It's not the poor (if not non-existent) job prospects, which have persisted for years upon years -- coupled with huge students debts -- that have suddenly caused this angst; it's declining enrollments that affect the $200,000 and $400,000 salaries of law profs and law school deans...

The quality of the beef in European McDs is higher than in the US (McDs has to comply with European regulations). Don't know if this extends to Britain (Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda have been selling beef patties with 30% horse meat in them, it was recently found). Also, if a Big Mac is $17 in...

Barny's right: visiting as a tourist is one thing and living and working in a place something entirely different. Who would want to live in or around London, when the average speed on the M25 is 4mph, when there's always something wrong with the Tube, when the various privatised rail services...

The US of A. But my wife and I are actively looking to get out (we've been to South America a few times and will be heading to Norway this summer). The advantage (the sole one these days?) of a British passport is the freedom to live and work in Europe (but will this remain if the Tory...

I'm a British citizen and have spent the single largest chunk of my life in Britain. My mother and two of my brothers live there. But I haven't the slightest desire to visit the place again. The infrastructure is crumbling, the prices sky-high, the wages kissing the ground, the people and the...

Speaking of the interplay of coding and math for a quant, there is a market for a book that simultaneously teaches very basic C++ and very basic numerical algorithms. I have books that do it in MatLab, I have books on very basic C++, books on very basic numerical methods -- but none that do both...

Well, I'm going off on a tangent but the topic seems interesting. The first point is why calculating a tree of variations should be considered "logical" in any sense. As a tournament player I calculate such trees as a matter of course but the tree of variations is constructed on the basis of...

Article in the Guardian:

It's easy to be poor at logic and be an excellent mathematician but this is a whole other issue (the logic part comes in only when trying to present a body of results in an organised, coherent, and succinct fashion). I do know excellent coders who either don't know math or have no aptitude for...

Is this correct?

I don't dispute it. I was wondering if a C++ background affords them a head start in picking up FP. I'm not sure. I ordered some coding-oriented books on category theory last week. Could be. C++ will probably become even more unwieldy than before. It's probably the topic for some other...

Hmmm, I sniff the potential for a course in communication targeted towards MFE applicants (just like the C++ course). It could focus on the use of English in the context of math finance and coding (i.e., not just be a generic course in Business English or Business Communication). What comes to...

Officially or the real rate?

For most profs the tedium of meetings and admin work is a welcome relief from the pretence of trying to do math. What appetite they might have had for research math fizzles out by the time they get their tenure.

Does it make learning Scheme or ML easier?

Article in Der Spiegel.

Anyone here going to Davos this year? I hear the food and wine aren't bad. (Source)

Greer's latest blog post, along similar lines, but taking a longer-term view.

And how right he was.

Speaking of which, I rather liked this film (saw it a year or two back).

Proof positive that austere times are upon us: Of course this doesn't cover quants, who are by and large too poor to afford a mistress (maybe can't even afford a high-class call girl).

I've got his book "Reinventing Collapse" and have read all of it. I was so impressed with it I even organised a discussion about it last year. In case you haven't already seen it, here is his essay on the "collapse gap," which he wrote seven years ago. I also recommend Greer's "The Long Descent"...

To get the ball rolling here's Dmitry's:

These are all glorified admin jobs which anyone with half an IQ of 220 could do. In fact many of these appear to be honorary jobs.

This is Kunstler's latest blog post along with a prognosis for 2013. He even quotes Taleb.

The undergrad stochastic course will likely contain a lot of topics of no use in finance -- maybe even nothing useful. All the three grad courses look promising. In the undergrad, Monte Carlo looks interesting but you could choose data structures or statistics instead.

When did either Einstein or Hawking ever take an IQ test? I think Hawking has said he doesn't know what his IQ is and that concern with IQ is for losers who have nothing else to show off about. I think Marilyn vos Savant has an IQ of 220 -- what good has that ever done her?

Marissa Mayer (supposedly) put in 130-hour weeks. To paraphrase Herman Goering, each time I hear about what long hours someone is putting in, I reach for my revolver (or rather, my plastic sword as that's what I'm practicing with to become a sellsword a la Game of Thrones).

Read and enjoyed the book (by Ken Follett). Also liked his book Triple. Pillars of the Earth is set in a real English past in contrast to Martin's, which exists in fantasy.

Game of Thrones as Theory, in Foreign Affairs.

It's been a recurring trope over the last few years that bad models designed by incompetent and naive quants were the culprit for the implosion of the subprime mortgages specifically and the "recession" (really an enduring depression) generally. I always loathed that disingenuous explanation. As...

A perceptive expose of Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise.

This isn't correct. As a tournament player I argue that chess is vastly more complex than C++. There is much more to learn both in terms of ideas and by way of detail. Furthermore, the serious literature for strong players has only exploded in the last two decades or so, with offerings by...

The materials aren't there to take one from novice to expert in a structured way. Anyone on the novice-expert spectrum (shy of being an expert himself) will either be groping tentatively in the dark or needing an expert's mentoring and guidance. This is what makes it an unnecessarily...

In the UK, in theory after earning a first class honors in math or finishing a master's, one can go on to do a PhD in three years. But in a mainstream area it is very difficult. Firstly because British degrees have been getting weaker, and secondly because research frontiers have been advancing...

Even in the UK, let alone the USA.

East European universities are among the best value in the world -- inexpensive but high-quality programs. The downside of Poland is race prejudice in day-to-day life. I visited the place about three times during the '90s. Things may have changed since then. If you think you can live with the...

Interesting article in Asia Times.

Instead of Ash, try Capinski and Zastawniak's Probability through Problems, maybe followed by Capinski and Kopp's Measure, Integral and Probability. Just the first will give you a head start by introducing you to sigma algebras and random variables (rigorously). Apostol is even more difficult...

Ash's book is self-contained with regard to measure theory. It's one of the best texts on measure-theoretic probability out there, written with great care and meticulous attention to detail. If you work through the book conscientiously you'll have a better grasp of rigorous probability than most...

There´s a decline in the ability to pick up new things (one notices this even in one´s thirties). But maybe more importantly, physical factors creep in uninvited -- carpal tunnel, back problems, eye problems. The point you bring up about being stuck on the treadmill is true.

Thought-provoking article by Pepe Escobar.

Applied mathematicians and engineers make up heuristic arguments for the conceptual tools that they use, rather than insist on strict proofs and definition-lemma-theorem-corollary structures. Making up heuristic and ad hoc arguments and arriving at heuristic and ad hoc insights is key in quant...

That´s overkill.

True. This probably holds for several South American countries (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, etc.). The hurdles you face are 1) possibly weak command of English, 2) not being experienced with fast-paced courses, and 3) poor command of math and coding. The free courses (Coursera, for...

Finished ´A Game of Thrones´(the book) and have now started the sequel, ´A Clash of Kings.´Author does a sterling job of describing the struggle for positional advantage on the chessboard of Westeros among such patient and careful players as Tywin Lannister and Stannis Baratheon. Robert...

Tyrion is one of the three central characters in the series (the other two are Jon Snow and Arya Stark). Not sure how long GRRM has to live and if each volume is taking five or six years, we may not see Vol.6. Winter is coming. On vacation in Ecuador at the moment so I had to leave my plastic...

You may hope for it but I don't see any logical reason it should improve.

It would be an amusing idea to make a list of all the bum MFE and MFM programs out there whose sole raison d'etre is to part students (usually unwitting international ones) from their money.

It's meant to be savored -- maybe an episode every two days. That way the two seasons would last six weeks. I am 250 pages into the first volume, Game of Thrones, which will be followed by Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, Feast for Crows, and Dance with Dragons. I've also ordered three books of...

Yes, and Keynesianism as policy has been out for, oh, between 35 and 40 years (ironically it's Nixon claiming that "we're all Keynesians now" that sounded the death knell for it). Keynesianism was realised to be a spent force by the last '60s, when it was realised it was having unwanted...

What "recovery?" They are zombie institutions that are masquerading as living. The "big lie" (a la Hitler) of today is that the "recovery" would have been jeopardised if the large banks had been allowed to bite the dust. They are not lending anyway. And the big companies are sitting on at...

In Europe in the '20s and '30s, European fascism (Italian and German) involved the takeover of the state by industrial capital, the state being used to keep industrial capitalism going in a time of crisis. Today it's the takeover of the state by finance, where "losses and costs get socialised...

I don't. The policies are more or less the same. For reasons difficult to put into words, I think the momentum of decline will pick up after the elections (could be wrong) because the powers-that-be have desperately tried to maintain a facade of normality for the last few months. A German...

Merlin was produced on a shoestring budget. Game of Thrones' first ten episodes cost between $50m and $60m. There are several big-name English actors in it (Sean Bean, Charles Dance, Lena Headey). The filming was done in Iceland, Ireland, Croatia, and Malta.

Swords-and-sorcery is my thing (though the sorcery component is so far non-existent in GoT).

Anyone been following the HBO series Game of Thrones? I've been so impressed I bought a plastic sword for myself, which I've been practicing with. I know you've got to stab people with the pointy end.

This can be done but at least one of two conditions must hold: 1) The student is among the strongest and most gifted, who started taking graduate courses as an undergraduate and/or 2) The field of research is narrowly specialised (e.g., "ghostlike representations of pseudo- nearfields")...

40 + 3 (unless his uni is Scottish) + 1 + 3 = 47. But of course many doctoral students are taking more than three years (four years, five years).

I don't recommend it. As you have noticed they don't really have any proper career placement. There are other things also wrong with the program. I live in Minneapolis. It is not a financial hub. It is 350 miles to the nearest hub -- Chicago. Maybe similar objections can be made for the...

What reasons?

They are two sides of the same coin. The second- and third-tier programs lure international students whose profiles are not strong enough for the first-tier programs. Be wary of programs that are outside financial hubs: the contacts and networking will not be there, the faculty will likely not...

*Shrug* -- it's your money and your time. If you're aiming for a job in the USA, what you propose to do is probably a bad bet. Some of these institutions have poor placement records. Even ranking programs are struggling to place their people. In the US market you won't be able to compete for the...

You're asking the wrong question. There are quite a few second- and third-tier schools that will be happy to take your money and give you a worthless credential at the end. Your question should be not whether you will get accepted (you probably will) but whether the credential will help you. Ask...

I'm an ardent reader of the The Archdruid Report, which comes out every Wednesday night. Over the past few weeks the Archdruid has been sketching a fictional (yet plausible) scenario of the collapse of US military and economic power. The 4th installment just came out within the last hour. It is...

Not hard; it's just time-consuming because of its size and it takes time to be able to code fluently in it. Exactly. Yep.

Because some of us know C++ and know what is involved. There's no "easily" about it. The certificate course can only be an introduction. I have books on my shelf that are introductions to C++. Mastering these books does not mean you "know" C++.

That is a poor choice. That's not correct.

This math paper generator is pretty good, as good as the postmodern generator, which has been around for some years.

Anthem is here but no lyrics. Not sure there's going to be a proper coronation ceremony for Prince Michael.

The German they kept as a "prisoner" was the "prime minister" of Sealand previously, who then staged the ill-fated "coup." Prince Roy arrived on a helicopter with a revolver and he let off a few shots in the air when he landed. In the annals of Sealand's history, this event is known as the...

Measure-theoretic?

There are some shitty programs out there where there's a disconnect between what's taught and what's assigned as homework (or turns up in exams). In what areas are you having problems? Zoom in on what specifically is giving you a problem. Probability? Stochastic? Numerical methods? There are...

I've been following the story of Sealand for several years. The death of Prince Roy some days back came as a bit of a shock and one's thoughts, naturally, must be with the royal family in this time of grief. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the American media has given this some coverage.

I get 9 languages as the minimum.

I'm not sure it works since for example one person could be 1010101 and the second could be 1010100. There is one language that the first speaks but not the second but no language that the second speaks but not the first.

Is it precisely one language that X speaks and Y does not or at least one?

Yes, Python is an excellent language to learn OO from. You can even create and deploy classes at the command line. As for the argument that if you learn C++ you can learn any other imperative/OO language because it will seem easy in comparison, that's like Arnold telling the 98-pound weakling...

It's impossible -- impossible -- to predict what the financial sector will look like five years from now. I expect profound changes in the USA's geopolitical position -- which will mean profound changes in US financial markets.

Fascinating essay by Orlov today:

Sure. Fair comment. But you did say, "will never catch on." Again, this is an assertion without an argument to back it up. Other than pointers, what is so difficult about C vis-a-vis Python? This outlook just seems, well, a trifle dogmatic.

Why not? Other than not having pointers, what are they missing? And what is so scary about Python?

Interesting article on IB in New Statesman:

Why do you say that? The differences I can see are that Python is a scripting language (versus compiled for C++), that it doesn't need a main() method, and that it doesn't have call-by-value (as everything is an object). Otherwise both Python and Ruby offer a painless introduction to both...

Python.

From the 1977 all-Soviet-Union Mathematical Olympiad: Seven dwarfs are sitting at a round table. Each has a cup, and some cups contain milk. Each dwarf in turn pours all his milk into the other six cups, dividing it equally among them. After the seventh dwarf has done this, they find that each...

Haskell, Python, and C are core. Algos is core. Prog language concepts is core. If there's an optional course in numerical methods, consider that core. With this kind of background, assimilated at the proper pace (i.e., not rushed), you'll be head and shoulders above those who've taken a hurried...

What are the theory courses? One or two courses in data structures and algorithms will serve you well. Any courses covering lambda calculus and functional programming will serve you well. A course on programming languages that traces the evolution of languages and programming constructs, as well...

Transcript of a recent Hudson interview.

Python is a good place to start -- not only for the fundamental constructs of imperative languages but also as an introduction to OOP. The book by Lutz mentioned above is a great reference -- but not so good as a text to learn from. My favorite is Lambert's Fundamentals of Python: From First...

What is the set of technical skills that a quant has? Has anyone ever attempted to define this? The whole idea of a sound fundamental education is that it (ideally) provides a flexible framework and context for learning new things, which both fit into and alter the framework. My feeling is...

This is a recent book by William Tabb, published by Columbia. An excerpt:

C is the lingua franca of programming. It's something worth doing carefully and thoughtfully.

You mean you're not Dr. Pangloss.

Michael Hudson on his new book, The Bubble and Beyond: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/overview-the-bubble-and-beyond/

Doug is talking about a possible 2nd edition. The book was reviewed a week or two back in Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/08/the-wall-street-book-everyone.html

Probably the first. For a budding financial engineer, tensor and exterior algebras, Jordan and rational canonical forms, and bilinear forms are luxuries. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors is probably as far as he needs to go, with enough about characteristic polynomials to make sense of it.

The only thing you can do with such a PhD is pray for a tenure-track academic job. The bar is so high for such jobs, I hear, that one literally has to have published a book to stand a chance. The humanities PhDs I know are eking out a subsistence living as adjuncts.

Damon Horowitz urging people to get a Ph.D. in the humanities here. I'm sceptical.

Google also succeeds in attracting over-achievers. The point is there is an oversupply of talented and qualified people -- something predicted by Lester Thurow in his 1990s book, "The Future of Capitalism." It thus makes no sense to single out finance when the same problems apply to law, MBAs...

Same goes for people who go for law degrees.

Why not?

Justin Fox's review of Doug Henwood's 1997 book, Wall Street, in the Harvard Business Review. Henwood is talking of a second edition now.

Not currently reading it but since Gore Vidal just died I'm reminded of his novel, "Creation," set in 500 BC. It's the fictional account of a Persian diplomat at the height of Persian empire (Darius, Xerxes, Artaxerxes), who makes extended visits to other power centres of the era (India, China...

I serendipitously discovered this recent essay by Paul Craig Roberts a few minutes ago. I don't find much to disagree with. And he says a few good words about Michael Hudson. Macro economics is ideology, not science.

No scholarships (that I know of). Hence either more loans or family support. If you realise an American MFE is a dicey proposition, why go for it? For the last two or three years experienced posters on this forum have been uttering doubts and issuing caveats about the advisability of doing an...

No offence, but this sounds more accurate: At the beginning of the interview, say, “As you can probably tell from my accent, I’m not a native English speaker, and though I can function perfectly well in English, I hope you won’t mind if I ask you to speak slowly or to repeat things.”

Try to read the FT (Financial Times) regularly and try to connect the dots for yourself. The first problem is that both the US and world economy don't follow the principles and ideas professional economists espouse. You can work through regular economics texts and not be any wiser after you...

You don't need it and you're wasting your time with it. You need some general background understanding of how the US economy works, how the global economy works, but that will come more from exposure and osmosis than from reading hefty tomes on macroeconomics, which will lead you astray. Perhaps...

Michael Hudson being interviewed by Max Keiser (23 minutes): Hudson's new book, The Bubble and Beyond, is out now and I'll order a copy myself: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/07/the-bubble-and-beyond/ And a perceptive talk on Veblen given by Hudson in Istanbul last month...

Linear algebra is foundational in that students learn for the first time how to move back and forth between conceptualising and proving on the one hand and calculating on the other. If an area of math only has the first, it's likely it's already sterile and in its senescence; if it has only the...

That's right -- sometimes it's just a fancy title for matrix algebra. Done right, it begins with the formal definition of a vector space (essentially a module over a field). Matrices are merely used for computational purposes in the framework of a rigorous theoretical development. Is the...