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KackToodles
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 10th, 2010, 6:58 pm

would einstein be able to answer your trick interview questions? would be pass your interview process?
 
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prasenjit0211
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 10th, 2010, 7:24 pm

He would probably fail (that too intentionally).
 
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tu160
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 10th, 2010, 8:02 pm

absolutely, that would be great for marketing!
 
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KackToodles
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 1:04 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: tu160absolutely, that would be great for marketing! but would he accept your offer after your 25 year old brash MFE dude confuses him for an hour with trick questions about how to time three hours with a seven hour hourglass, and badgers him because he didn't know some trick move in C++?
Last edited by KackToodles on October 10th, 2010, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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twofish
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 4:14 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: KackToodleswould einstein be able to answer your trick interview questions? would be pass your interview process? No idea. Although it doesn't matter.I'm pretty sure that Paul Krugman, Barack Obama, Barry Bonds, and most Nobel prize physics laureates wouldn't do well with our interview questions. But we are not handing out prizes for physics or intellectual brilliance. We are hiring people so that a particular type of job gets done.
Last edited by twofish on October 10th, 2010, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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ThinkDifferent
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 5:31 am

the thing about tricky questions is that this ability alone is not sufficient to become a good scientist/quant etc. try solving problems from international math olympiad. most professors will end up scratching their heads for hours while 15 y.o. kids manage to get a perfect score solving every single problem.....i have no idea how they do it...some of those kids are just amazing. i try to solve some of the problems every year, and very rarely succeed. usually end up frustrated and depressed lol however while many of them do not end up as great mathematicians, quite a few end up getting Fields medal e.g. Perelman got perfect score at IMO, Smirnov (who got fields medal this year) got perfect score TWICE, Terence Tao was the youngest gold medal recipient etc.
 
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prasenjit0211
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 5:49 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: ThinkDifferentthe thing about tricky questions is that this ability alone is not sufficient to become a good scientist/quant etc. try solving problems from international math olympiad. most professors will end up scratching their heads for hours while 15 y.o. kids manage to get a perfect score solving every single problem.....i have no idea how they do it...some of those kids are just amazing. i try to solve some of the problems every year, and very rarely succeed. usually end up frustrated and depressed lol however while many of them do not end up as great mathematicians, quite a few end up getting Fields medal e.g. Perelman got perfect score at IMO, Smirnov (who got fields medal this year) got perfect score TWICE, Terence Tao was the youngest gold medal recipient etc.I think Maths Profs could answer all these IMO questions without fail.
 
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ThinkDifferent
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 6:34 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: prasenjit0211QuoteOriginally posted by: ThinkDifferentthe thing about tricky questions is that this ability alone is not sufficient to become a good scientist/quant etc. try solving problems from international math olympiad. most professors will end up scratching their heads for hours while 15 y.o. kids manage to get a perfect score solving every single problem.....i have no idea how they do it...some of those kids are just amazing. i try to solve some of the problems every year, and very rarely succeed. usually end up frustrated and depressed lol however while many of them do not end up as great mathematicians, quite a few end up getting Fields medal e.g. Perelman got perfect score at IMO, Smirnov (who got fields medal this year) got perfect score TWICE, Terence Tao was the youngest gold medal recipient etc.I think Maths Profs could answer all these IMO questions without fail.) absolutely not. every year, right after problems are out, Terence Tao tries to tackle some of the most interesting problems in his blog. sometimes it ends up in quite a big names mathematicians collectively brainstorming the problems on that blog. only very few of them are able to provide a solution. solving IMO problems requires a quite peculiar talent/skills.....having a PhD, years of teaching, and knowing riemann-roch theorem will not help
Last edited by ThinkDifferent on October 10th, 2010, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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plus
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 6:56 am

Einstein would have the intellectual ability to give new and interesting answers to silly brain teasers. That would be enough for those masturbating over intellect to hire him on the spot.He would not enjoy being told what to do, but I could easily see him working as a code monkey in place of being a patent clerk. The job would not interest him and he would do minimum requirement as fast as possible so he could work on his theories. A more interesting question would be 'what would Einstein study if he was born 110 years later?'
 
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ThinkDifferent
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 7:27 am

as a matter of fact, Einstein was prety good at brainteasers.
 
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Cuchulainn
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 10:57 am

QuoteA more interesting question would be 'what would Einstein study if he was born 110 years later?' String theory!If Einstein had not discovered relativity, someone else would have done so. Michelson/Morley/Fitzgerald. Right place, right time.This man was something else von Neumann He would be Quant numero uno imho.
Last edited by Cuchulainn on October 10th, 2010, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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DominicConnor
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 1:52 pm

Also he couldn't write an exception safe constructor in C++ More seriously, I wonder if his world view was consistent with the consensus in quant finance ?He basically did not believe in uncertainty, and my understanding is that he believed in an essentially deterministic universe.That means he would be quite uncomfortable with stochastic models, and although he could no doubt master the algebra, I'm not sure he'd really get it.Or conversely, he might find something better.
 
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daveangel
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 2:00 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: DominicConnorAlso he couldn't write an exception safe constructor in C++ More seriously, I wonder if his world view was consistent with the consensus in quant finance ?He basically did not believe in uncertainty, and my understanding is that he believed in an essentially deterministic universe.That means he would be quite uncomfortable with stochastic models, and although he could no doubt master the algebra, I'm not sure he'd really get it.Or conversely, he might find something better.given that one the first five seminal papers that he wrote was to do with Brownian motion, I suspect he will be quite comfortable with stochastic calc.
knowledge comes, wisdom lingers
 
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mynetself
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 2:16 pm

Einstein wouldn't be studying String Theory today, he was never a mainstream scientist. He'd probably be attacking ST and LQG alike, all the while dreaming up something new.As for his world view, saying that he did not believe in uncertainty is a slight simplification. He did not believe that the underlying first principles are probabilistic, but he was happy with probabilistic (effective) models. Meaning that if a phenomena would exhibit a random behaviour, he'd be perfectly happy to model it using the appropriate tools. Only he'd be convinced that there is some underlying *deterministic* reason behind the (apparent) random nature. So as far as finance goes, he'd probably be happy with stochastic models, but would try to prove that they emerge from some underlying deterministic principle.
 
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DominicConnor
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would you hire einstein to be a quant?

October 11th, 2010, 2:17 pm

Good point, we can think of Brownian motion as either random or chaotic, which often uses the same mathematics but aren't the same thing.Chaos was known about when Einstein first started his work, but was not mainstream, and I strongly suspect he'd not have recognized the term but might have been thinking in terms of deterministic but effectively unpredictable systems.