

Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA - wturner
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/inquiring-minds-edward-frenkel-math-doesnt-suck

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j2kun
If anyone is interested in learning some of those secret weapons, I'm actively
writing a lengthy series on elliptic curve cryptography. In particular, I'm
implementing the algorithms in Python (with an emphasis on human readability
over efficiency).

[http://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic-
curves/](http://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic-curves/)

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lovemath
As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since
the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a
blanent PR plug.

~~~
ergoproxy
Can't say I was disappointed by this article, because I've grown to expect so
little from the press: Unfortunately, media coverage tends to be sensational
and topical. Here we see an example of a sensational headline followed by a
topical article.

For a couple of years in college, I worked as a senior reporter at a
newspaper, wrote hundreds of published articles, and never wrote a headline:
Copy editors write headlines. Besides writing the headline and correcting
spelling and grammar, editors also rearrange paragraphs, delete stuff, re-
write whatever suits them, decide what page the article will appear on (front
page...buried on the fiftieth page) and decide whether or not to print the
story at all. Headlines themselves are written in a domain-specific language
called "Headlinese." The American Copy Editors Society has an annual "Headline
Contest":
[http://www.copydesk.org/programs/contests/headlines/](http://www.copydesk.org/programs/contests/headlines/)

WRT the headline's boast of using math as a "secret weapon against wall st,"
the article said "Frenkel blames the global economic crisis of 2008-09 on
inadequate mathematical models used by bankers and traders to predict the
financial markets..." My reading of this is that if people weren't so math
illiterate, they could have seen the crash coming and perhaps taken steps to
protect themselves.

Hmm. As both a mathematician and a former vp at a wall st bank, I have a
different POV on the 2008 financial crash: Massive premeditated fraud on
savers and retirees perpetrated by a handful of TBTF banks, enabled by lax
government regulation and an "easy money" policy by the Fed. I didn't need my
math skills to see this crash coming four years in advance, and my math skills
didn't give me any "secret weapons" to stop it or defend myself--it was kinda
like being caught in a tidal wave, except this was a tidal wave of greed and
corruption.

Journalists say, "A picture is worth a thousand words." William Schiesser
said: "An equation is worth a thousand pictures." I wish there were more
equations and more coverage of STEM in the popular press. It would be great if
journalists proved their conclusions logically, step by step, from their
premises.

But the sad truth is that _journalism is nothing but a form of entertainment_.
And there are so few of us who find math entertaining that journalism (other
than niche journalism) will never cater to us.

~~~
lutusp
> WRT the headline's boast of using math as a "secret weapon against wall st,"
> the article said "Frenkel blames the global economic crisis of 2008-09 on
> inadequate mathematical models used by bankers and traders to predict the
> financial markets..." My reading of this is that if people weren't so math
> illiterate, they could have seen the crash coming and perhaps taken steps to
> protect themselves.

Yes, and to be more specific, if decisionmakers and stockholders at financial
institutions were more math-literate, they would have realized their
institutions were taking huge risks based on sloppy mathematical reasoning. A
higher general level of mathematical knowledge and skill would likely have
prevented a crisis in which the entire economy teetered on a foundation of
unsustainable mortgage debt -- obligations in which the property borrowed
against was worth less than the debt, encouraging the borrower to simply walk
away.

