Paul Wilmott
| Paul Wilmott | |
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| Born | 8 November 1959 |
Paul Wilmott (born 8 November 1959) is a researcher, consultant and lecturer in quantitative finance. He is best known as the author of various academic and practitioner texts on risk and derivatives, for Wilmott magazine and Wilmott.com, a quantitative finance portal, and for his prescient warnings about the misuse of mathematics in finance.
One of two sons of an accountant and an entrepreneurial mother, Wilmott attended grammar school in Birkenhead, and read mathematics at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He stayed on to get a DPhil in fluid mechanics in 1985.
After working on mathematical modelling for various industries, Wilmott learned of the potential uses of mathematics in quantitative finance from a friend, and decided to become a consultant in the subject. He is currently the co-owner and Course Director for the Certificate in Quantitative Finance, a half year distance learning course on mathematical finance at Fitch Learning, a London-based company providing training for the financial services industry. He was a founding partner of Caissa Capital, a volatility arbitrage hedge fund, since closed, and founded the Diploma in Mathematical Finance at Oxford University; and the journal Applied Mathematical Finance. He is a director of Wilmott Electronic Media, which manages Wilmott.com, a website for the quantitative analyst community, and is a director of Paul & Dominic Quant Recruitment.
Wilmott is a vocal and long-standing critic of the use of mathematical models in finance by quants. In a paper published by the Royal Society in 2000, he stated that "It is clear that a major rethink is desperately required if the world is to avoid a mathematician-led market meltdown...The underlying assumptions in the models, such as the importance of the normal distribution, the elimination of risk, measurable correlations, etc., are incorrect".
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