Parade's End

The BBC's transmission of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End (a co-production with HBO, and adapted by Tom Stoppard who has a good...

The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash (?!?)

Claiming that the Black-Scholes equation had anything to do with the Credit Crisis of 2007-2009 is a bit like claiming Daimler-Maybach were ...

The intellectual void at the heart of the Occupy movement

The Bayesian algorithm at Amazon recommended David Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years with the product description Economic...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and why we can't solve the Euro crisis

I, like a lot of technically minded-people it seems, like a good crime thriller.  Having spent a year mesmerised by Sara Lund's sweaters...

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

This the text of a book review recently published in the Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol. 5, part 2, pp. 297–298 Robert Peston, the BBC’s...

Greedy, or desperate, bankers

I am completely bemused. This morning I hear Robert Peston (the BBC's Business Correspondent) arguing the case of the airline industry, ...

The Royal Society calls for more funding of financial maths

The Royal Society published a report on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths impact on the service sector. They devote a whole chapt...

Driving by using the rear view mirror

Last October the EPSRC, my funders, asked me to contact the Science Media Centre about media coverage of the credit crisis. This was becaus...

Maths and the Markets (II)

Following my last post I drafted a letter on behalf of the leading researchers in financial maths in the UK. After some edits, Sir David Wa...

Maths and the Markets

The Turner Review of Financial Services Regulation identifies one of the causes of the financial crisis as a "misplaced reliance on sop...

Don't blame the quants

Thalia Zariphopoulou has a couple of articles on her website about the financial crisis. A piece by Steven Shreve that appeared in Forbes ...