true indeed INFIDEL .. I am not ICMA too but I do have respect for the department and the school. I think Carol Alexander and Salih Neftci are fantastic teachers and I do think their content is applied enough to prepare anyone for a confident entry into the Securities Industry (Global Markets). I am also a believer that judge a candidate by the content rather than the surface. I have seen professionals who even though might not be the most mathematical of people , still do well in their jobs because they work with an unique understanding ability..Whether you call it intuitive / Logical blah Blah blah I do not know....I do agree that one needs to have a certain basic quantitative ability to work in Derivatives ...But this Quantitative ability can manifest itself in many forms (not just deriving the Libor Market Model or the BS model through Stochastic Calculus ..There QUANTS who get paid to do that ...Traders / Structurers need other skills along with an understanding ability of what the QUANT has done and what it can do for a Product or a Trading book ) ...There are a couple of ex ICMA Grads (my close friends) who have made the biggest Derivatives Trading P&L this year (in their designation..ie Biggest Associate Trader Pnl for eg ) in 2 London IBs I know of and are up for a big payout in Feb , Are they lucky ? Are they smart ? Is it right place right time ? or rather right place right mind ...Different people can always say different things but lets face it . they made it and many others did not , so stop judging these guys from the school they are from .....It mattered for the first 6 months of their career probably but now they are far ahead of many Oxfords and Cambridges and Warwicks... You'd be surprised how diversely trained and diversely successful the City is ! Disclaimer (Thanks INFIDEL) : Note: "You" is a general "you", not anyone in particular.

oh my, Dr Anderson at Reading just destroyed the last bit of respect it's computing dept have: http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/ ... e.shtmlHis invention: "nullity" = 0/0 to solve the problem of what 0^0 means... (he claims this hasn't been solved for 1200 years)Here's his "Proof":0^0 = 0^(1-1) = 0^1 x 0^-1 = 0/1 x 1/0 = 0/0 = -0- (-0- is his new number "nullity").

I wonder if there is anything so daft that might provoke the government into taking away Reading's right to be called a university ?

Nullity at University of Readinghttp://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/article ... ture.shtml

COPYRIGHT of author:I could not agree more with him. I am assuming this is ED from the Quant World.Emmanuel D.I am very sceptical about such "theory". First, it is quite confusing, and I don't see how it can help to understand some problem. if 1*nullity = 2*nullity, then nullity/nullity = 1/2 AND nullity/nullity = 2/1. But even worse, 1 = 2*nullity/nullity. So you have to say that nullity/nullity is undefined to explain this answer. Your transreal arithmetic fails to do this, as far as I understood it. Second, since it's still confusing, Iit would have been better to wait for for mathematical evidence before teaching this strange things to pupils. This is nearly criminal. Next year some other teacher will come with a theory that says that 2+2 can be equal to 5 for very large values of 2 and small values of 5. Will he be right to teach this to pupils before being confronted to his collegues? I think no. Working in this way is just plain dangerous. Science and math needs to be proven before they are taught - that's a basic fact. You also failed to do this, and this is criminal imho. Finally, nullity doesn't really help when it comes to computers. How will you represent it (and both infinity and negative infinity) using a 32 bits integer? Or a 64 bit integer for that matter? Remember you still have to follow the rules of 2-complement arithmetic... That's going to be quite hard. I guess the solution is to give them some special values, and to hardwire the calculus in the ALU - this is not very efficient imo. I don't want to say that the theory is some random bullshit (I'm inclined to think that a representation of these numbers is quite important), but I'd wait for better proofs - ie not proofs that are backed up with the IEEE FP standard.

QuoteOriginally posted by: tibbaroh my, Dr Anderson at Reading just destroyed the last bit of respect it's computing dept have: http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/ ... e.shtmlHis invention: "nullity" = 0/0 to solve the problem of what 0^0 means... (he claims this hasn't been solved for 1200 years)Here's his "Proof":0^0 = 0^(1-1) = 0^1 x 0^-1 = 0/1 x 1/0 = 0/0 = -0- (-0- is his new number "nullity").If Dedekind were alive today he would roll over in his grave.Anyone spot the fatal flaw? Using this 'logic' I can prove that nullity is really equal to zero!Another way is to say is to take logarithms (disclaimer: not correct)let's say x = 0^0now take logarithms of both sides (log a^m = m log a)Thus log x = 0* log0 = -infinitynow take exponentialsx = exp(-infinity) == 0So answer is zero, right?

taxonomy of anything equals anything

What if you divide nullity by itself ?My view of academia is that we pay these guys to think up weird shit. We accept that much of it is useless because the best stuff is effectively impossible to predict.When I am elected Tsar of Europe I would go further, and require that all state funded universities have at least one person who is trying to break the law of mass/energy conservation, or prove that intelligent design is true, or that Hitler was entirely innocent of the holocaust.I perceive too much warm fuzzy consensus in academia, and we need some cage rattler, or devil's advocates. But to do this you need smart people who come up with genuinely crazy, yet smart alternative takes on things.But that is not the same as the drivel emitted by "academics" at Reading Agricultural College for the hard of thinking.For instance there is also their Captain CyborgIn the words of one of our readers, it made him "embarrassed to be British, University educated, and a robotics engineer."Reading University of Hard Knocks offers a solution to the problems we have in Iraq.We issue an ultimatum to the various armed factions that unless they surrender today, their children will be sent to Reading university.

I went to ICMAAlexander and especially Neftci are different gravyAll people on quant programme went on to structuring rolesOthers on the programme, including myself, have gone onto trading roles.think the course gives you a fantastic understanding of all cocncepts and has allowed me to progress very quickly within the bank im at at the mo

I recall Alexander teaching me linear algebra whilst she was a part time lecturer at a different university... unfortuntely she never had time for preparation and it ended up pretty sketchy, hopefully she has improved since then at Reading.