Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Demo or die

Publish or perish used to be the standard for academic promotion and still describes the career path in the majority of disciplines. In some areas however, most notably computer science, it is not enough to publish papers with the solution of a problem - one also needs to demonstrate that the solution actually works in the real world.

I think computational finance is also one of these areas, and borrowing a phrase from the performing arts, I would like to propose that its standard should be demo or die.

All this came to my mind at today's seminar talk by Vladimir Surkov, who together with Sebastian Jaimungal and Ken Jackson developed a method for calculating option prices called Fourier Space-Time stepping (FST for short). Now these guys can publish and demo !

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