Trading desks on Wall Street and hedge funds everywhere increasingly generate their profits using quantitative financial models that rely on advanced mathematics and computers. Investment firms now routinely employ large quant departments staffed by former physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists. Emanuel Derman was one of the first physicists to move to Wall Street, and My Life as a Quant traces his pilgrims progress from ambitious academic scientist to managing director and hea...

Brief Hours and Weeks is the author's account of growing up in a small, tightly knit, first-generation Polish-Jewish community in Cape Town in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.Observing through at first naive and then later more sophisticated eyes, he describes his childhood and youth in a protective off-the-boat immigrant Jewish family in very British-Commonwealth South Africa as apartheid becomes increasingly coercive.Through vivid and candid personal stories, he brings t...