Members in the Media

“Good or bad, moral or immoral, people are going to make markets and trade via computers, and this is a natural area of financial engineers.”
Emanuel Derman, Columbia University, describing what he sees as the future role of Wall Street “Quants,” The New York Times, September 13, 2009.

“It’s a bit of an embarrassment for our field, because what it really means is, we don’t seem to understand gravity.”
Greg Landsberg, Brown University, referring to the extreme weakness of gravity compared to the other fundamental forces, U.S. News and World Report, September 11, 2009.

“We have codes to protect buildings in earthquake-prone cities like Toyko…We don’t have anything like that in the financial world”
Eugene Stanley, Boston University, ABCNews.com, September 15, 2009.

“In the post-Cold War era, potential U.S. adversaries will no longer be backed by a state (i.e., the former Soviet Union) posing a strategic threat to the U.S. homeland,”
Dean Wilkening, Stanford University, taken from a 1995 report for the RAND Corporation predicting the future of conflicts, Time Magazine, September 17, 2009.

“The canceled European deployment would have added only marginally and at high cost to the full coverage of the United States already afforded by the existing ground-based interceptors,”
Richard Garwin, IBM, on the cancellation of the missile shield program, USA Today, September 17, 2009.

“You can look at each cell rather than averaging it out, and say, ‘the cell on vertex number 348 did this,’…When you actually have 10,000 of them to analyze the data, you can understand stat distributions that we normally would not have gotten in ensemble measurements, and that’s a huge thing.”
Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, Ohio State University, describing his new technique of manipulating individual cells using magnetic fields, FoxNews.com, September 21, 2009.

“They aren’t something you can walk up to and touch, but they are not purely mathematical constructions, either.”
Jerrold E. Marsden, Caltech, describing the complex structures formed in turbulent water, New York Times, September 27, 2009.

“What draws me to Williams, above all else, is the remarkable community of faculty, students, staff, and alumni that define the college,”
Adam Falk, Williams College, on being named the next president of Williams College, The Boston Globe, September 29, 2009.

“There’s nothing you can get at the LHC that can do any damage to anybody, except a hammer,”
Sheldon Stone, Syracuse University, on the potential threat posed by a data analyst at CERN accused of having links to Al Qaeda, Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2009.