http://fms.kalx.net Using mathematics and software to model financial concepts Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:47:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en That is mathematics in a nutshell. People seem to overestimate the expressiveness of mathematics. Math is limited to propositions: statements that are either true or false. Philosophers have the luxury of making statements that cannot be proved either true or false. "As synthetic a priori judgments, the truths of mathematics are both informative ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=125 I've read books by people that don't really know all the details of what they are selling to their publisher as facts. That seems to be a good way to sell books when you think you got fired because you knew more than the people that hired you. At Morgan Stanley, ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=106 My wife and I spent a glorious day with our friends on July 4th. It was a potluck with the theme of typical American food, but almost everyone was born somewhere else. My potato salad didn't go over so well, mustard was a must in my upbringing in the South, ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=87 It is not the case [math]PQ[/math] is the line segement from the point [math]P[/math] to the point [math]Q[/math]. It is more like the line containing [math]P[/math] and [math]Q[/math] having magnitude [math]Q - P[/math]. If [math]PQ = ST[/math], then [math]PQS = 0[/math] and so [math]S = P + s(Q - P)[/math] ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=64 Math is all about following your nose. Grassman had the notion that [math]P^2^ = 0[/math], where [math]P[/math] is a point, was how to detect intersections and somehow that idea generalized to higher dimensions. Don't forget that in Grassmann's time the of notion working in general [math]n[/math]-dimensional space was a novelty. ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=48 I tried various LaTeX WordPress math plugins and didn't like any of them. In fact, I thought they were all pretty awful. Wedging ancient TeX technology into the world of HTML seems to be an impedance mismatch. Don't get me started on MathML. That is a nonstarter. Every time I tried ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=15 Hermann Grassmann had the notion that it was possible to use algebra to prove geometric facts. Instead of using scalar Cartesian coordinates, he used actual points in space. Let [math]E[/math] be Euclidean space and call the elements of [math]E[/math] points. If [math]P[/math] and [math]Q[/math] are two points then [math]PQ[/math] should ... http://fms.kalx.net/?p=1