Paul Wilmott
Author of The Mathematics of Financial Derivatives: A Student Introduction
About the Author
Works by Paul Wilmott
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Places of residence
- Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, UK
New York, New York, USA
London, England, UK - Education
- Oxford University (St. Catherine's College) (mathematics)
Oxford University (St. Catherine's College) (D.Phil.) (fluid mechanics) (1985) - Occupations
- mathematician
entrepreneur
teacher of quantitative finance
hedge fund founder
juggler
undercover investigator - Organizations
- Oxford University
Members
Reviews
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Statistics
- Works
- 17
- Members
- 470
- Popularity
- #52,371
- Rating
- 3.5
- Reviews
- 3
- ISBNs
- 46
- Languages
- 2
Well, Paul Wilmott and David Orrell explain that this is a dumb idea and why it is dumb. Human beings don't act like rational agents, motivated by their own self-interest, they are greedy and conniving idiots. Just because they have an advanced degree in mathematics doesn't mean they can tell the economy how to run itself. So the book talks about the main issues inherent in our financial system and goes over the histories of giant financial crashes and how the bankers and investors went home to their families and drank the wine of celebration for losing that much money. It's really rather frightening that such a naive group of people are responsible for this sort of thing, but well, it is hard to model something that accurately reflects a nonlinear system.
Take the weather for instance. Anyone could tell you a situation where the weather person got their info wrong, and you forgot your scarf or umbrella as a consequence. The weather is an extremely complex system with dozens of variables. I'm impressed that they can predict tomorrow's weather, to be honest. Now the same goes for finance. Anyone and their grandma will tell you that the stock market is about people buying and selling things. Since people don't behave rationally, we had to introduce some mathematics borrowed from a lot of different places. Most of it tries to model random behavior as I mentioned before.
Anyway, this book is really good. It even includes jokes and things. So if you want to know about that sort of thing, it isn't really heavy on the mathematics and the stories are interesting. Also, the book is not called Quantitative Seizing, it is called The Money Formula, as seen in the picture.… (more)