I've been amazed to discover how much brain power works in the financial industry by lurking on these forums. If you took away the high pay, what percentage of these PhD's and rocket scientists would give a s&$t about finance? Personally I'm finding the subject rather dry and boring, but then no one is paying me. If the quant market dries up, where are all these brilliant people going to go? I'm asking because I'm in the position to choose my career path right now. I'm looking seriously at some kind of quant biology specialization and forgetting about finance entirely, since not only is it interesting but I suspect there is going to be a lot of money in this field going forward. Thoughts?

QuoteOriginally posted by: mathematocratI've been amazed to discover how much brain power works in financial industry by lurking on these forums. If you took away the high pay, what percentage of these PhD's and rocket scientists would give a s&$t about finance? when you take away the possibility of a cushy tenured job, immortal fame, and a nobel prize, how many scientists or mathematicians would give a hoot about science?

Paul Erdos

Quotewhen you take away the possibility of a cushy tenured job, immortal fame, and a nobel prize, how many scientists or mathematicians would give a hoot about science?Srīnivāsa RāmāṇujaṇSG

QuoteOriginally posted by: deepvalueQuoteOriginally posted by: mathematocratI've been amazed to discover how much brain power works in financial industry by lurking on these forums. If you took away the high pay, what percentage of these PhD's and rocket scientists would give a s&$t about finance? when you take away the possibility of a cushy tenured job, immortal fame, and a nobel prize, how many scientists or mathematicians would give a hoot about science? More than the number of fingers of all quants put together!If you remove all the advantages made available by the academia, the scientists and mathematicians will have to find employment elsewhere (in addition to academia) not because they won't give a hoot about science, but because they have to pay the bills. Most mathematicians or scientists do not gain immortal fame or Nobel prize, and they do their trade while aware of this fact. I do math because it's fun, not because anyone pays me for it.mathematocrat makes a good point.

QuoteOriginally posted by: MartingaleBusterPaul Erdos you call yourself a mathematician? when is naming 5 mathematicians sufficient to "prove" that many scientists give a hoot about science. All your 5 examples show is that there are a handful of weirdos who love sciences, sort of like there are weirdos who starve to do art or rock'n roll. By the way, if paul erdos did not crave immortal fame, why did he publish so much? Why waste time publicizing his results if not to claim credit?

4 give a hoot... 5 give a hoot... it follows by induction.

QuoteOriginally posted by: deepvalueQuoteOriginally posted by: MartingaleBusterPaul Erdos you call yourself a mathematician? when is naming 5 mathematicians sufficient to "prove" that many scientists give a hoot about science. All your 5 examples show is that there are a handful of weirdos who love sciences, sort of like there are weirdos who starve to do art or rock'n roll. By the way, if paul erdos did not crave immortal fame, why did he publish so much? Why waste time publicizing his results if not to claim credit? Good question - maybe. It turns out that many up-and-coming mathematicians sought co-authorship with Paul Erdos, rather than the other way. But is the desire to have immortal fame inconsistent with a genuine love with what one does? Do you know in fact of any mathematicians/scientists who give up their craft as soon as they are informed that no immortal fame will come to them?You wrote: "Why waste time publicizing his results if not to claim credit?"Are you pulling my leg? Do I need to respond to the obvious? Are peer-reviewed journals publicity stages? Or, technical books, for that matter. What do you propose? No publishing? No authorship? I think you are taking us for a ride.

Personally, I say good riddance to people that only quant for the money. The people that enter a field only for the pay tend to do the absolute short-term minimum to get rich quick. They don't really care about understanding the topic, advancing the field, fixing broken models, or adding value in the long-term. I suspect they are the crank turners that Paul complains about and that are (partly) responsible for this financial crisis.I saw the same pattern afflict computer science during the dot-com boom. Bunches of people that couldn't program their way out of a paper bag flooded CS departments looking for a meal ticket. I suspect one could see the same pattern in any bubble -- the people that flock to something for quick riches seldom create long-term value for the industry.

.

mathematocrat: If you took away the high pay, what percentage of these PhD's and rocket scientists would give a s&$t aboutfinance? There is a balance here. I'm not going to do this for free, but at the same time, you have to pay me a lot less to do quant work than you would to have me to paint houses or flip burgers. There is a lot of cool stuff that I'm working on, but the men in black would take me away if I discussed it publicly.

Studying Market Psychology is interesting.But it's not the field for quants. Yes, quants who want a quick buck tends to be the ones that create the crazy toxic instruments.

in what other field, besides economics, can you work with highly quantitative models that try to model human behavior (not breeding, population, etc.)? Not physics, biology, chemistry, ......Finance and economics are interesting and hard because you are trying to model the actions of humans, which are not always rational. You cant get this from any other field (with high quantitative work).Even if you could find such a field, it would be so specialized that it wouldnt support more than 10 specialist.BTW, analyzing surveys (for phsyc) or voting polls of elections doesnt count.

QuoteOriginally posted by: jomniStudying Market Psychology is interesting. But it's not the field for quants.It makes money then its in the field for quants. There are some very interesting ideas in mathematical computational sociology. If you ask the question, what is the amount of collateral that you want the counterparty to post and under what circumstances should you withdraw collateral, then you very quickly get into some very interesting mathematics that no one has yet explored.What is pretty clear now is that any future pricing model for complex derivatives needs to have provision for liquidity issues and feedback. Also I think it would be interesting to go step by step into the derivation of risk-neutral pricing and thing about what happens in situations of non-constant risk aversion. I wouldn't be too surprised if you tried to rederive Black-Scholes, you'd find some extra term pop out if you assume non-constant risk aversion.And also it would be quite interesting if you tried to create a market model which explains under what circumstances someone would even try to buy a complex derivative.Finally, I think we need to look at the basic concept of no-arbitrage. The basic idea of no-arbitrage is that you should be able to decompose any derivative in term of basic market instruments, and that has been the game. Where this has broken down is that you go from market price of vanilla option -> fair value of complex derivative. One question that I have is what mechanism forces the price of the complex derivative to be the price that I quoted for it?

QuoteOriginally posted by: jomniStudying Market Psychology is interesting.But it's not the field for quants. Yes, quants who want a quick buck tends to be the ones that create the crazy toxic instruments. Pure quants are essentially curve fitting extrapolators. this means they extrapolate the past into the future. this means quants encourage people to jump onto the band wagon. essentially, being pure quant is a form of psychological bias. the bias is that quants look at the world from the narrow telescope of mathematics. in doing so, quants miss out on the many other factors that drive market movements.