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Comment by 20161112 | Hacker News Reader

20161112

Sigh...I guess I'll be sticking with web dev.

If you can come up with a profitable strategy then you can still be hired or just trade yourself. Without this there is no point being a quant. Besides quants still need developers - those integrals will not help building maintainable trading apps.

I would say those questions are for recent graduates who want a junior quant role.

I wouldn't be discouraged. I just had a look and parts 1 - 4 are simple maths, and everyone should know those maths anyway. Then part 5 is application of simple arithmetics (except questions 8 and 12) to options, which means if you already know arithmetics you only need to learn what an option is.

What I mean is that you should be learning basics maths anyway, and when you know a bit you can solve all those questions.

What a lot of people could benefit from is learning how to learn.

EDIT: Thanks for downvotes guys. Should I also downvote when someone says "don't be discouraged with distributed systems, or asynchronous programming" etc? I don't know those things, so maybe I should downvote those people?

You are getting downvoted because "everyone should know those maths anyway" is dismissive (I think you meant "everyone [who is applying for a quant position] should know those maths anyway," which is more fair)

No, I did mean everyone. Or everyone who cares about understanding the world. Or rather, everyone who cares about understanding the world they themselves should be wanting to learn more maths than just sums and multiplications.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

| everyone who cares about understanding the world.

Those fluent in math really need to drop this egocentric view. If you can't do matrix manipulations you aren't curious about the world? Give me a break. The breadth of topics that yield understanding of various parts of our world is vast. Do you have an early university understanding of history, politics, math, sociology, psychology, economics, law, capitalism, etc. etc. etc.

If you don't grok matrix manipulations (which are a very simple thing to understand: matrices are linear transformations and matrix multiplication is composition of linear transformations; for some reason this is only taught as a theorem, not as the first lesson in Linear Algebra), you're missing on a really great tool that helps us a lot in understanding almost every kind of large scale process precisely. Without this tool, we'd be back to the 18th century in math, physics, engineering, computer science...

It's pretty high up there in "list of things to learn if you're curious about the world". Of course, so are history, economics, etc'

I didn't say you shouldn't learn those things, did I?

I guess some of these could be considered basic math, maybe if you associate only with physicists and statisticians. The calculus / related rate problems are straightforward, but most folks will have had no familiarity with Brownian motion, matricies, and most other topics here. Hell, there is little point for > 99% of software developers to think about or use arctangent in any given year.

I have a feeling you have a different definition of "simple maths" than most people.

yea the reality is that the vast majority of people know little to no calculus or linear algebra

I even kinda enjoy it, but the last time I had to do any kind of separable partial differentials was... a decade ago? There's very few domains where it's commonplace.

Hello, I'm hoping for a suggestion for some math courses that will help me understand these questions.. I only took algebra in high school and didn't go to college. Since, I've looked at a couple things (basic proofs, lambda calculus) but quickly was overwhelmed. What is a good starting point for someone who can reverse and exploit all sorts of binaries but does not know what a derivative is? Just start on Coursera? My other question is - what can I achieve with this knowledge? What use is it? What problems can I solve? I think one thing that kept me progressing learning code was I could see what I was looking to achieve and I reached it. I learned it because I wanted to understand it. When I look at math, I see something that I will never be able to understand... There is a part of me that has a strong desire to learn it but the other half tells me to leave it alone. Is it understandable in the same way programming is understandable? By learning the syntax?

Part 1 is geometry, calculus and linear algebra. An advanced high-school education in mathematics would let you answer these questions.

Parts 2 and 3 are probability and statistics, but they are the kind of advanced statistics that is typically only taught to math students. Second and third year university courses in probability and statistics would let you answer these questions.

Part 4 is statistical mechanics, I think. That's a third-year physics course, and one of the more mathematically demanding ones, at that.

Part 5 is specific to finance. The course you are looking for is probably called Mathematical Finance.

The conventional route to learning all this stuff is an undergraduate degree in mathematics, with an emphasis on statistics. Now, getting there is a long road, but you have to start somewhere. You might possibly be able to learn it all on your own, but it's easy to get stuck and hard to get unstuck without a teacher to help you.

If you are in the US, start by taking a couple of classes in a community college. In your case, the course you are looking for is probably called Pre-Calculus or maybe Algebra II. If things go well you can continue from there.

As for what use this is, apparently you can get a good job as a quantitative financial analyst if you know this stuff.

Thanks a lot for the reply, really appreciated.

I do not see any answers for the questions, do you mind giving them to me so I can check mine?

1. http://math.oregonstate.edu/~show/docs/256-SnowPlow.pdf

2.https://www.academia.edu/16888899/The_joy_of_problem_solving

7. http://www.math.ucla.edu/~ronmiech/Actuarial_Review/Related_...

Wow - wish I could upvote this more than once, it's a sad day when someone suggests that some knowledge is within reach and they're downvoted because what they suggested is "too hard"

And I'll be sticking with business dev. Major respect to those who crush these things.

Surely there are areas between web dev and quant that you can do and are interesting.

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