Emanuel Derman, a former managing director and head of the
Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs & Co, is a professor
in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners.
He is the author of My Life As A Quant.
Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, and became managing
director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and other
scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving from
a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a
measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in
which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent
the other way can win you your own private Caribbean island.
They are known as "quants" because they do quantitative finance.
Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the
messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to
use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.
<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/derman10/derman10_index.html>Link
