The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

A look inside the world of "quants" and how science can (and can't) predict financial markets: "Entertaining and enlightening" (The New York Times).

After the economic meltdown of 2008, Warren Buffett famously warned, "beware of geeks bearing formulas." But while many of the mathematicians and software engineers on Wall Street failed when their abstractions turned ugly in practice, a special breed of physicists has a much deeper history of revolutionizing finance. Taking us from fin-de-si...