Author: Emanuel Derman

Last night after I got home a colleague called to suddenly offer me a last-minute ticket to see a preview of The Seagull directed by…

There are sad things in addition to the continuing collapse of the visible financial world and I ran into two of them in the past…

For weeks the word ‘decimated’ has been appearing with increasing frequency in the financial press:’decimated banking industry’, ‘Lehman’s decimated mortgage portfolio’ etc. I remember hearing…

Stan Jonas once told me about aldaily.com…… and I made it my home page. Every day it has links to all sorts of new articles,…

I like swimming and track and field, but why should only swimmers be allowed to traverse the same distance via four different methods, and to…

Many years ago in the past, while running, I decided to try to shut my eyes and see how many steps I could take at…

when I came here came from one source, a fictional one: the novel “Marjorie Morningstar” by Herman Wouk. It’s the story of a young Jewish…

Ever since I read Camille Paglia’s “Break Blow Burn” in which she comments on 43 famous poems, I’ve admired her writing. Her commentary is completely…

I spent six days in Stockholm at the Nasdaq OMX Derivatives Week. It was a phenomenally well-organized conference, with only 4 or 5 speakers each…

There are a slew of books on happiness lately: www.nybooks.com…… Many years ago a colleague of mine, dissatisfied about the mismatch between his potential and…

Unexpected pleasures are always better than expected ones, and occasionally I’ve gone to see movies that I know almost nothing about except for the fact…

Why does using neuroscience to improve advertising bother me? I’m not sure, but here’s one argument I came up with. According to Corinthians (and many…

While sleepless and low in Hong Kong at 4 a.m. I’ve seen several newspaper news reports that don’t seem either as dramatically good or bad…

My father knew a man called Mr Gilmour who was an engineer who finally retired somewhere in the late 1960s. In those days you used…

Why do they put ice cubes in urinals? The Indian restaurant I ate in last had about 20 or 30 in each vertical porcelain receptacle,…

1. This scribble is my signature on the electronic credit card signature-reader at Duane Reade pharmacy. The device has a pathetic little screen, deeply scratched…

What is it about the phrase “A Mighty Servant That Never Sleeps” that makes it mildly blasphemous? I think it’s the “mighty” before the “servant”.…

Driving on the Van Wyck the other day, I was drafting a giant tractor-trailer, and on its rear in big letters was the company name,…

I put some of my lecture notes, in casual form, on my website at www.ederman.com…… I’ll add to them as my class progresses.

As I continue to look through applications to graduate programs, I keep running into the general degradation (that’s the right word) of the whole grading…

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking at applications for admission to financial engineering programs. It’s mind-broadening to see how many reasonable students…

I’ve never looked at facebook.com……, though I know what it is, but periodically I get people emailing me with encouragement to join facebook and then…