I Knew It! It's All Miss Smith's Fault!

Yes, I (a person who works in the world of finance and statistics and amatorization) am a devoted mathophobe (http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1100000/1095592/cb-p38-papert.pdf?key1=1095592&key2=9321076321&coll=GUIDE&dl=&CFID=26118967&CFTOKEN=67391957). And I place all the blame for that on Miss Smith. Before I encountered Miss Smith, I had been a veritible math whiz. Always put in the fast track in the classrooms of elementary school and in pre-algebra by 7th grade. Which put me in Miss Smith's Algebra I class in 1973, my eighth grade year. Where things swiftly went off the rails of my parents' dream of me becoming the only Gray with a half a chance of ever aspiring to a career as an engineer. And a highly desirable female one, at that. I am, unfortunately, not someone who easily picks up on theoretical mathmatics nor am I one who easily understands a concept for which there is no answer to "why" other than "because." As a result, I was always asking questions not about the process but the whys and wherefors of the process. Which were never answered. Which led to me not being able to work out how to apply the processes. Which, in a class in which our classroom seating was based on our current grading period's cumulative grade, led to me always being in the last row in one of the last seats.

With that background, it was with a great sense of schadenfreude mixed with smug satisfaction that I had seen much of this hedge fund, short selling, fund of funds, real estate, credit market crisis coming that I read this article today that pretty much places the blame for much of our current economic crisis on physicists and mathmeticians and their flawed prediction models:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10quant.html?partner=rss&emc=rss