Epstein Secrets

have the advantage." Claude Shannon [Tribus & Mclrvine 1971]. I find the last quote very reassuring. In my own opinion, though less well known than Einstein, Von Neumann ranked close to Einstein in terms of genius. Like Einstein, he didn't merely bring in a single profound new idea; but seemed to change

st is in that of finance. The earliest work on random walks was that done by the mathematician Bachelier on stock prices. Bachelier's work predates Einstein's own random walk model of Brownian motion. For half a century Bachelier's work was largely forgotten. The use of random walks in finance was rekin

what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information', but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been use

nd demand. In Handbook of Financial Markets: Dynamics and Evolution, ed. T Hens, KR Schenkhoppe, pp. 57-130. Amsterdam: Elsevier Bray A, Graham 3, Harvey C, Michaely R, 2005. Payout policy in the 21st century. Journal of Financial Economics 77,483-527. van den Berg H, 2010. Mathematical Models of Biolo

d 'common sense' and simply worked out the mathematical consequences of this fact. Thus was relativity born. Economists seem to prefer the route of Einstein's peers, forever producing more complex theories to substantiate the existence of a hypothetical aether. Science can not be built simply on common

els that arise from the Classical view. This puzzle is particularly intriguing because the best mathematician who ever worked on economic problems, John von Neumann, introduced the key mathematical tools in a study of such a Classical, infinite-horizon, production-based model before Arrow and Debreu used the sa

sed at the Institute of Advanced Mathematics in the USA on the Princeton University campus, next door to the Institute for Advanced Study that housed Einstein. Turing travelled to America in 1937 and completed his doctoral thesis at Princeton. He might have stayed, but Europe was heating up and war seemed i

u can see a link on my website. Very soon after Turing’s paper was published, a number of people proposed better practical implementations. In 1943, John von Neumann of Princeton University created the architecture for ENIAC, the first stored program computer, developed for the United States Army’s Ballistic HOUS

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

rnet, everyone doing any of those things became a data generator. The result was an exponential rather than a linear rate of knowledge accumulation. John von Neumann also has a cameo in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings, for game theory. What Wiener missed here was von Neumann’s seminal role in digitizing computation.

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

rnet, everyone doing any of those things became a data generator. The result was an exponential rather than a linear rate of knowledge accumulation. John von Neumann also has a cameo in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings, for game theory. What Wiener missed here was von Neumann’s seminal role in digitizing computation.