Having originally been an engineer, I will not deny experiencing the occasional vicarious pleasure when I see an outsider shaking up the financial industry.

One titan of mathematics who certainly did that was Benoit Mandelbrot — father of the maths of chaos. His primary beef with normal economics and finance was that the frameworks were way too fragile at the edges. One of his more acerbic observations was that “compared to other disciplines, economics tends to let its theory gallop well ahead of its evidence”. Ouch...

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