The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

A chronicle of how a financial sector once known as a clubby aristocracy became the playground of the technocrats, THE QUANTS is much more than a 'revenge of the nerds' story. It traces the history of the phenomenon, beginning with a 1950s gambler named Thorp who believed that the markets weren't random, to Thorp's successors, math geniuses spilling from the world's elite schools bent on using formulas and computers to rule the market. In the process it explains how our economy was brought close to collapse, and examines whether this take on the American Dream truly died with the crash.