Business is
serious academic study.
We realize that this complex financial system touches the lives of everybody, and the more we can do to understand it, the more we know about ourselves. The more we can stop crises like
Enron, like
Long-Term Capital Management, the collapse of the
ruble/
peso/
yen... Things that effect everybody.
I'm at the Stern School of Business majoring in Finance, Statistics and Physics, also known as a branch of Applied Mathematics.
I can say firsthand that Business is more than Management and ridiculous MIS corporate-speak-wannabe-geeks. It's more than accountants attempting to learn how to add.
Math Finance is one of the burgeoning new fields of research, applying Partial Differential Equations, chaos theory, Markov Chains, Finite Element, Martingales, Brownian Motion, binomial trees, utility theory, and econometrics to equities markets, as well as other things.
We predict, evaluate, and manage the risk for the world financial markets. We search for arbitrage. We find ways to equate mathematical and physical phenomena with the random behavior of markets. We then publish academic papers. Basically, it's all the fun stuff from Mathematics and Physics with more results, and is more applicable in 'real life'.
We theorize, program, and apply our own mathematical models, which forces us to be mathematicians, crack programmers, and bankers all at once.
I am a business major, and am smarter than you. I know a lot of math. I am a very well-rounded individual. Does that scare you?
Anark:
Risk Management !=
day trading. Creating a theory about
finite element methods applied to
option pricing PDEs is not more
mercenary than writing it about
fluid dynamics. Applying the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to financial
crisis is not any more self-centered than applying it to
quantum mechanics.
Mathematical Finance is a very new field in which somebody like me could
actually make an impact. I love Physics, but I've gotten up to Quantum II and Gen
Relativity and am still learning things that other people thought of years before.
In my
seventeen years, I've known thousands of people
much smarter than I, because I go out of my way to try to meet them. I don't judge people's intellect on their choice of
profession. I think you should get out more.