Isaac Newton: Financial Regulator

Alongside the stock market boom of the 1690s was rampant inflation, caused by the fact  that much of the coin circulating in England had be...

History repeating itself?

The macro-economics of August 2011 looks much the same as August 1971, but have we learnt anything about the markets over the past forty yea...

Why magic? ⇔ Why gold?

Someone has asked me why this blog is Magic , maths and money. In 1902 two sociologists, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert wrote ‘Outl...

Structured finance in the twelfth century

From about the twelfth century the Catholic Church began to examine closely the concept of usury , elevating it, without scriptural justific...

What is financial mathematics

My article " What is Financial Mathematics " was included in the anthology " The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010 ". Fo...

Martin Creed

Simon Singh passed my details on to the Fruitmarket Gallery when they contacted him about talking about the work of the artist Martin Cree...

Back from a blog sabbatical

This blog has been dormant for over a year, a year where I have done more research into the links between science and finance, and I now pla...

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 whole of western science is based on financial maths

A historian Joel Kaye has written widely on the development of science in medieval Europe. In Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century...

Mathematics, Economics and Decision Making

The 2009 Alan Tayler Lecture was delivered by Prof Lord Desai of the London School of Economics and Political Science at the University of O...

Culture clash?

The FSSC report Graduate Skills and Recruitment in The City has the following quotes (p 45) from a graduate recruitment manager at an inves...

It's academic

On of my favourite quotes from the credit crisis comes from the 2/02/08 edition of The Economist, the article " No Defense " on fr...

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...