Writer and Professor Emeritus of Financial Engineering at Columbia University
BOOK
Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian
BOOK
Models Behaving Badly
BOOK
The Volatility Smile
BOOK
My Life as a Quant
-
Why Is This Interesting? – The Tetragrammaton Edition
A single name–Bjork or Madonna–is grand. A single name with its own name is even grander.
Emanuel Derman on X
The Claude Running Edition https://open.substack.com/pub/whyisthisinteresting/p/the-claude-running-edition?r=2fez&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Thank you, what a great essay. Too many insights to quote as an example. I met Hersh together with my friend David Edwards in Albuquerque in 2012 and I regret I didn’t know more about him when I did meet
With the rise of AI in mathematics, many of us are rethinking what math is for—and what it even is. These are philosophical questions, and we should discuss them carefully and openheartedly. This classic essay by Reuben Hersh is a great place to start. https://gwern.net/doc/math/1979-hersh.pdf
What would today's post-Nazi Europe and post-Nazi world (if we had been lucky) look like if not for Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill's ascent to the Prime Ministership of the British Empire in May.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/2026-05-13-one-of-the-great-hinges?r=2fez&utm_medium=ios
“In mathematics, your steady state is you are stuck. Research mathematics is frustrating. If it is not frustrating you are probably tackling problems that are too easy. So if you’re the kind of person that needs a daily high, then it’s probably not the right subject.”
Jon Jacobsen discusses what a lot of us are thinking about: how to preserve (and maybe even amplify?) human intuition -- and the pleasure of understanding -- in an era when AI is reshaping the practice of math. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00283-026-10512-7