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My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Derman, Emanuel 1st edition (2007) Paperback
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- GenresFinance
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About the author
Emanuel Derman
13 books67 followersEmanuel Derman (born c. 1945) is a Jewish South African-born academic, businessman and writer. He is best known as a quantitative analyst, and author of the book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 8, 2025
The book started well: a humble guy trying to make his way in the super-competitive realm of Physics.
The struggles, dreams, solitude. All there.
Then, his career changes made one thing obvious, one thing that is so common in academia and Physics research: feeding your ego through your results.
Anyway. It is his story. His personal story to say that he also got fame and reputation. A human story.
The struggles, dreams, solitude. All there.
Then, his career changes made one thing obvious, one thing that is so common in academia and Physics research: feeding your ego through your results.
Anyway. It is his story. His personal story to say that he also got fame and reputation. A human story.
February 11, 2025
What really counts
I attended a couple of talks by Emanuel Derman at a conference last month, and thought they contained a lot of sense on the applicability of models, metaphor and theory to quantitative analysis in finance (a quant, it's explained on p3 of this book, is someone who performs this analysis). Following a pleasant exchange with the speaker, I was kindly loaned this book by my colleague; in it, Derman describes his perspectives on finance, together with a good deal of detail about his personal history. This is of interest because he started his academic career as a particle physicist, and switched to finance when he joined Goldman Sachs in 1985 to become one of the first POWS (or Physicists On Wall Street). The transition he made has been described by Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan ) as "from the hardest of all sciences to the softest of the soft", and so his thoughts on what approaches and techniques could be expected to work in finance are valuable. To this end, he describes how he and his colleagues (who included Fischer Black, one of the developers of the well-known Black-Scholes model) came up with a couple of useful financial models, and suggests some reasons for their success and popularity.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book; it's a well-written tale of an interesting life, and Derman describes places and people with a keen eye. My only criticism might be that this is a little too detached in places: thus, he mentions many of his colleagues, and is scrupulously polite about almost all of them. This is - of course - admirable as a personal trait, although it perhaps might not be the first thing that we're looking for in an author.
Originally reviewed 31 July 2012
I attended a couple of talks by Emanuel Derman at a conference last month, and thought they contained a lot of sense on the applicability of models, metaphor and theory to quantitative analysis in finance (a quant, it's explained on p3 of this book, is someone who performs this analysis). Following a pleasant exchange with the speaker, I was kindly loaned this book by my colleague; in it, Derman describes his perspectives on finance, together with a good deal of detail about his personal history. This is of interest because he started his academic career as a particle physicist, and switched to finance when he joined Goldman Sachs in 1985 to become one of the first POWS (or Physicists On Wall Street). The transition he made has been described by Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan ) as "from the hardest of all sciences to the softest of the soft", and so his thoughts on what approaches and techniques could be expected to work in finance are valuable. To this end, he describes how he and his colleagues (who included Fischer Black, one of the developers of the well-known Black-Scholes model) came up with a couple of useful financial models, and suggests some reasons for their success and popularity.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book; it's a well-written tale of an interesting life, and Derman describes places and people with a keen eye. My only criticism might be that this is a little too detached in places: thus, he mentions many of his colleagues, and is scrupulously polite about almost all of them. This is - of course - admirable as a personal trait, although it perhaps might not be the first thing that we're looking for in an author.
Originally reviewed 31 July 2012
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews