Save Wallstreet's Soul?

Newsweek published the following article recently: Revenge of the Nerd  
Paul Wilmott is a 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician ond arguable the most influential quant of today .. Wilmott has cultivated a loyal following of truth-seeking converts from the failed school of thoughts that the entire world can be turned into Greek symbols, plugged into equations priced and predicted...



His example: the aeronautics engineer designing a state-of-the-art jumbo shall apply well known, robust  aerodynamics equations and not reconcile the elegant design with the  equations.
Our experiences come from modeling complex chemical reactors, like blast furnaces, ...  with the same conclusion. If your models and numerical representations automating, say, a blast furnace are not robust enough you advise the operators to better hide and run ... Andreas and his team has published such experiences in Wilmott magazine, summarized them in a column, Letters from Steel Town, and presented them in Wilmott Finance Focus events. The editor of Wilmott magazine, Dan Tudball, called us Coal Faced Mathematicians, I think 2004.
When we transformed this experiences and technical approaches from complex technical systems development to finance (starting 1996), we not only seconded Paul's concerns (without knowing them explicitly), but worked towards robust model & method applications. Without compromise.

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