A Momentary Taste of Being

Change You Can Believe In --a brief introduction to one of the central ideas in Calculus, for those not necessarily mathematically inclined.

Mandelbrot is one of my great heroes--not for the book that I treat below, but for his amazing contribution to the understanding of fractals.  But the book reviewed below is worth a read for anyone interested in understanding chaotic dynamics and one view of the stock market. A Random Walk through Mandelbrot on August 31, 2004 2:14 PM |   When I was doing my graduate work, I hated most statistics. Most particularly I hated "random walk" models and "monte-carlo simulations." Whenever there was an anomalous blip that could not be readily explained, someone trotted out these hoary old creatures and set them to dancing. How delightful then to chance upon this: from The (Mis)Behavior of Markets Benoit Mandlebrot and Richard L. Hudson With such theories [Bachelier's Analysis, Gaussian Curves (Bell-Curves), and Random Walks] , economists developed a very elaborate toolkit to analyzing markets, measuring the "variance"...