Thu, 27 May 2010

Mathematical Logic Finds Unexpected Application on Wall Street

This kind of math is way out of my league, but I have noticed a decided uptick in job postings for very high level math programmers in a Unix environment, all based in Manhattan for "major Wall Street firms". Perhaps they're looking for an implementation team for this insanity - who knows?

The one thing this proves beyond a doubt is that stock exchanges have moved out of their traditional role as markets for companies to raise capital and morphed into casinos for very sophisticated high rollers, most of whom have armies of math and computer scientists to back their bets.

Is it any wonder the economy is slowly tanking?

In an unexpected development for the depressed market for mathematical logicians, Wall Street has begun quietly and aggressively recruiting proof theorists and recursion theorists for their expertise in applying ordinal notations and ordinal collapsing functions to high-frequency algorithmic trading. An ordinal notation system is used to name each ordinal in a certain initial subsequence of the countable ordinals; such systems have recently been applied by elite trading operations to the parameterization of families of trading strategies of breathtaking sophistication. Ordinal notation high-frequency trading algorithms, also called ordinal arbitrage systems, pit their strategies against similar algorithmic opponents on electronic exchanges for a few fleeting seconds, during which thousands of trades are executed, including exploratory trades that test the strategies of opposing human and machine traders.

(link) [Christian Marks]

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