Via Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Report : The Black-Scholes formula has approached the status of holy writ in finance, and we use it when valuing our equity put options for financial statement purposes. Key inputs to the calculation include a contract’s maturity and strike price, as well as the analyst’s expectations for volatility, interest rates and dividends.If the formula is applied to extended time periods, however, it can produce absurd results.

Any poet, even the most allergic to mathematics, has to count up to twelve in order to compose an alexandrine. - Raymond Queneau

For the last one month I was completely occupied with work . Weekdays and Weekends flew away before I realized that it has been quite sometime since I had read any book. This weekend , being a long weekend , decided to spend my time reading a book on ambiguity. I stumbled on to a reference to this book on some blog and was intending to read at some point in time.

I have often wanted to underline statements / words in a pdf but the security settings of most of the online documents prevented me from doing so. I like the content being in a word doc . Found a nice software (free) which converts a pdf in to word doc. I am pretty happy with the quality of the output. Link : HelloPdf

One of my research colleagues ( a Phd in Math) wanted to get in to industry. However her desire came at a rather disturbing economic time( 2008 ) . She interviewed at various fund houses but the job situation looked grim. However she managed to get 2 offers. One from her home land , a plum treasury related role and other a job at Galleon hedge fund, NYC. She joined Galleon.