[Interest] thanks for extra reading suggestions - sorry to insult technical writers

[Till Oliver Knoll]

Replying to the proper list...

Am 13.04.2012 um 00:08 schrieb Till Oliver Knoll <till.oliver.knoll at gmail.com>:

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> Am 12.04.2012 um 22:54 schrieb Paul Floyd <paulf at free.fr>:
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>> On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:46, Till Oliver Knoll wrote:
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>>> The truth is: the financial industry is dead simple compared to software
>>> engineering: throw a little bit of primary school math like addition and
>>> multiplication into the game, and you know how Interest Rate Swaps etc.
>>> work. Add a little bit of statistics (being able to compute the average
>>> already helps a lot) and you become an economist, and if you know about
>>> standard deviation, heck, you're champ!
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>> That's rather an exaggeration. The Black-Scholes equation is a PDE, which is a bit beyond the ken of most primary schoolchildren.
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> Okay, now take all this, for instance:
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>  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black–Scholes
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> and add to it all it takes to implement it in software: numerical stability, algorithmic, design patterns, not to mention the knowledge of any suitable programming language, tools, the understanding of a computer architecture (caching, suitable data structures to minimise cache misses...)
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> Then we get into the area of what it takes to develop software ;)
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> Off course I must admit that I never implemented stuff like this myself (however I did come across topics such as Monte Carlo integration in topics such as Radiosity calculation in computer graphics, Delaunay triangulation, ...) However I had the "joy" to solve PDEs during my studies (at least I think I did ;)).
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> Anyway, we agree that when targeting an audience in either topic you wouldn't want to describe what an option in the financial market is, nor what a compiler does in general when describing its switches or whatever.
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> Cheers, Oliver
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