Stephen Blyth Oxford University Press, 175pp If one were to write a creation myth for modern finance, the wave of mathematicians and physicists who left academia for Wall Street from the mid-1980s onwards would be at the heart of it. As Stephen Blyth recounts in the preface to his book, these quant pioneers knew virtually…
Continue reading..The In/Out Question: Why Britain should stay in the EU and fight to make it better by Hugo Dixon (Kindle Single, 130pp) European Spring: Why our Economies and Politics are in a Mess and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain (Amazon print-on-demand, 448pp) As the May elections to its parliament showed, the…
Continue reading..Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee WW Norton, 2014 Rapid technological change has become such a constant in our lives that it's easy to forget what the world was like before computers, the Internet and social media apps. Increasingly, these innovations are reinventing the economy and transforming corporations and the lives of individuals. Are these changes…
Continue reading..David Einhorn John Wiley & Sons, 2011 In his 1991 novel Time's Arrow, Martin Amis tells the story of a Nazi war criminal as if lived backwards in time. The time reversal shockingly inverts the morality of the protagonist's actions---as an old man he snatches toys from children and sells them for money, while in…
Continue reading..Nate Silver Allen Lane 2012 It's hard not to be impressed by Nate Silver. He is a quant journalist who has mastered diverse areas such as poker playing, sports analysis and psephology. He showcased his election forecasting skills in his FiveThirtyEight blog that was picked up by the New York Times. That propelled him into…
Continue reading..Nassim Taleb Allen Lane 2012 I first met Nassim Taleb in New York in the spring of 1998 while working for a trade magazine. I had been commissioned to edit a supplement on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, while Taleb at the time was a currency option trader…
Continue reading..The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood James Gleick 4th Estate, 2011 When I was starting out as a writer, James Gleick was something of a role model for me. His best-selling 1987 book Chaos was popular science writing at its best, telling the stories of the butterfly effect, fractals and strange attractors weaved…
Continue reading..Daniel Kahneman Penguin/Allen Lane 2011 I first met Daniel Kahneman in May 2001 when I was researching my still-unpublished book about probability. I had expected to visit him at his office in Princeton's economics department, but for some reason I can no longer remember, Kahneman said the interview should take place at his suburban house.…
Continue reading..Emanuel Derman John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2011 I first met Emanuel Derman in the late 1990s, when I was starting out as a financial journalist. I felt an immediate affinity. I respected him as a refugee from physics who had progressed much further in the field than I ever had. In person and in…
Continue reading..Hyman Minsky McGraw Hill 2008 Early on during my ultimately-to-be-abandoned Harvard PhD studies in climate science, I remember talking to fellow graduate students about the long-term prediction ability of global atmospheric computer models. These models divide the atmosphere (and sometimes the oceans too) into a three-dimensional grid covering the globe. The detail of real sky…
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