Emanuel Derman, a former managing director and head of the Quantitative
Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs & Co, is a professor in Columbia
University’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department,
as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is the author of My
Life As A Quant.
Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, and
became managing director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and
other scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving
from a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a
measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in
which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent the
other way can win you your own private Caribbean island.They are known as “quants” because they do
quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance
underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills
they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system
to making money.