um, AOL bought time warner, not the other way around.

euler - introductio in analysisin infinitorum -- brilliant work of euler from 1748 containing many striking results. english translation available.

bernhard riemann - on the number of primes less than a given magnitude -- riemann's one paper (~15 pages) on number theory, which introduced his famous zeta function (english version available in riemann's zeta function by edwards, a book dedicated to the very rich subtext of this terse paper)

shannon - a mathematical theory of communication -- seminal paper founding information theory

schrodinger -- find yourself a decent exposition of the analysis of the hydrogen atom using schrodinger wave mechanics. learn where all that junk they taught you in high school chemistry actually comes from!

Feynman Lectures on Physics -- comprehensive account from the man who knew physics as well as anyone.

ahlfors - complex analysis -- best text i know of on this subject in mathematics that shows up in the most surprising places in the sciences.

landau & lifschitz - course on theoretical physics -- 10 volumes on modern physics from classical mechanics to electrodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, fluids, etc. from nobel prize winner lev landau.

Fourier Analysis - t w korner -- intro to fourier analysis with many applications (after all, applications are the whole point of fourier analysis) from your basic heat equation stuff to calculating the age of the earth and other interesting things.

i think that in compiling this list, you will find two things to be true:
1. increasingly (in the last century, for example), important work is not (initially) published in books, but in papers.
2. trying to read the original works is fun for about 5 minutes. if you really want to learn, modern expositions in textbooks tend to be far better than the originals.

thank goodness the atomic bomb was invented, so that we could accurately tell the age of whiskey.

exactly. in fairness, the buyout price is in the neighborhood of 1/2 of it's post-crash valuation. and pretty much all of that loss in valuation came in 2008, hardly a banner year for equities. as for the business missteps, well who can say how long those have been festering. Sun probably was drinking the kool-aid and believing itself to be the $200bn infallible titan of industry that it was reported to be in 2000. pride commeth before the fall.

this is one of my favorite games of all time. i had the version for (original) xbox, which may or may not be based on the same code base. i was extremely disappointed--the graphics are just terrible. the soundtrack is one crappy song.

a friend who had a modded xbox ripped it and the whole game was like 250MB. not a whole lot of media files there. hopefully this version will be more polished. at $15 and with online play, who is really going to complain?

ok, nice to get the press coverage but an iPhone could probably handle "thousands" of daily transactions. compared to exchanges processing millions per second, this is not so impressive. a lot of them are using linux (NYSE at least uses it for some stuff, although they use AIX or z/OS for lots of stuff, too). it should come as no surprise to anyone that almost all financial markets operate on some type of unix or linux platform. really, what else would you use?

the top google result for "vim regex" is a geocities page, and a useful one at that.

obviously this is a tongue-in-cheek question, but...

if you are expecting to get attention from girls based on your laptop, maybe you should try a new approach to getting attention from girls.

I would say don't bother with an MBA until you've worked for a few years. Personally, I thing the degree is joke in general, but if you haven't even had any work experience, it means nothing to have an MBA.

if you are just going for a masters, you probably want to be a programmer/engineer, so theoretical is likely not the best way to go. that's the best i can do without some more information about your ultimate career goals.

if all you are doing is linear algebra, why would you use C++ instead of fortran, which is still top dog in that area.

thanks a lot for giving that informative list of spreadsheets. i've never heard of this "Excel" of which you speak, but perhaps someday i will investigate it.

i put bc -l (actually i usually don't bother with -l), but i actually use google a lot. if you "search" for an arithmetic expression, google will evaluate it for you. sometimes the answer even appears in the dropdown list of possible site matches in firefox. *sometimes* -- i have no idea when this will or will not work and why.

yes, i completely agree with you. the focus on quarterly earnings is representative of "short-termism" everywhere, which is usually detrimental to long term value preservation.

i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere. harness it when you can and don't be surprised when it causes people to do things that harm others.

actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really, it's the only motivator. what we need is an incentive structure (marketplace and regulatory framework) where greed does not necessarily compel people to do things that are solely beneficial to themselves, putting others at risk.

An interesting article, for sure. The issue with the Gaussian Copula model for pools of mortgages in CDOs is how sensitive they are to the assumptions of the model. If, for example, the annual growth rate of home prices is 2% instead of 10%, things look tremendously different. If correlations between housing prices in different cities is 50% instead of 10% -- disaster. The lack of stress testing of these models (checking what the results are for different inputs into the model) was a huge issue. Even if a model is decent (which in principle, copula models are), if they are too sensitive to inputs, then the prices it produces are not trustworthy. If the proper uncertainty was taken into consideration, then perhaps everyone would have been a little less gung-ho about CDOs.

Like the (worthless) Value-at-Risk figure, the (also pretty worthless in the end) Gaussian Copula was "easy" to understand. Given that the dynamics of financial markets are not simple and easy to understand, reliance on simple models that are easy to explain to the MBAs is probably not the best idea.