ABSTRACT
A wealthy acquaintance when recently asked about his profession reluctantly answered that he is a middleman in drug trade and has made a fortune helping drugs reach European markets from Latin America. When pressed further, he confessed that he was actually a ‘quant’ in a huge wall street bank and used mathematics to price complex derivative securities. He lied simply to appear respectable! There you have it. Its not fashionable to be a financial mathematician these days. On the plus side, these quants or financial mathematicians on the wall street are sufficiently rich that they can literally afford to ignore fashions.
