Will you freakin’ science and engineer types please shove your “People who excel in math become scientists and engineers; the people who can’t handle math get on the short bus to B-school” stereotypes where the sun don’t shine?! Admittedly, it’s been a very long time, but I can recall having some fairly stringent math adventures in some of my more advanced finance, econ, and statistics courses (fortunately, electroshock therapy has erased the nightmare memories of those happy times). And calculus was required.
The thing is — the finance guys have only started doing real math in the last 20 years or so. The math behind Black-Sholes — which won the freakin’ nobel prize — has been textbook fluid dynamics since the 1930’s.
Don’t get me wrong– now that Wall Street owns the whole country– they also have people who can do real math. That simply wasn’t the case for many, many years.
