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Tag archives: science books
Quantitative finance: what’s it really all about?
Mixing physics and finance – Jessica James is the author of the new Physics World Discovery ebook Quantitative Finance.
By Matin Durrani
Among the many joys of studying physics is that a degree in the subject can take you down lots of different paths. As our recent Physics World Careers 2017 guide revealed, they range from research and industry to education, IT and even sports, politics and the arts.
One particularly popular destination is the world of finance, which is hardly surprising given physicists’ love of numbers. Those in finance work in many different areas, with one of the most high profile – and lucrative – being the field of “quantitative finance”.
But what exactly does the term mean and what’s the field all about? To find out more, do check out the new, free-to-read Physics World Discovery ebook entitled Quantitative Finance, written by Jessica James – a managing director and senior quantitative researcher at Commerzbank in London.
As James explains in the introduction to her book, the field includes “complex models and calculations that value financial contracts, particularly those which reference events in the future, and applies probabilities to these events”. I encourage you to read her book, which is available in PDF, ePub and Kindle formats. And to whet your appetite, James has kindly answered some questions about what she does, her career to date and what the book’s about.
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Introducing Physics World Discovery
Free to read – the first five Physics World Discovery titles.
By Matin Durrani
What better way to celebrate World Book Day than by checking out Physics World‘s new series of free-to-read, short-form ebooks. Entitled Physics World Discovery, they are short introductions to some of the hottest topics in physics written by leading voices in the physics community.
Available online here, these short-form ebooks follow all the attributes of feature articles in Physics World magazine – being well written, accessible, timely and authoritative. But as ebooks, they allow authors to go into more detail than a standard Physics World feature and include plenty of graphs, diagrams and pictures too.
Being short, each title is an ideal starting point for for physicists at all stages of their careers to get quickly up to speed with an evolving physics field.
We’ve published five Physics World Discovery texts so far, with more in the pipeline. You can read them in PDF, ePUB or Kindle format, making them perfect for those wanting intellectual stimulation on a train or plane journey.
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Physics World‘s shortlist for Book of the Year 2016
By Margaret Harris and Tushna Commissariat
The year 2016 has not covered itself in glory. Divisive elections, various natural and human-made disasters and a depressingly long obituary roll of well-loved celebrities mean that for many residents of planet Earth, this solar orbit has been one to forget.
But if, for a moment, we concentrate solely on the year in physics, the picture looks brighter. In particular, it’s been another strong year for popular-physics writing, and over the past few weeks, we have been determining which of the 57 books reviewed in Physics World in 2016 deserve to be on our list of the year’s best.
The books that appear on the shortlist below are all well written, novel and scientifically interesting to physicists – the criteria we’ve followed since 2009, when The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo’s landmark biography of Paul Dirac, became our first “Book of the Year”. A couple of biographies appear on our 2016 shortlist, too, but they face stiff competition from books on big science, stringy science, loopy science, spooky science, jazzy science and more. There’s even a book of science infographics in the running – a first for a competition that is, naturally, dominated by words rather than images.
We’ll announce the winner of our “Book of the Year” award in the Physics World podcast in mid-December, but in the meantime, take a look at the shortlist. We think it’s proof, if you needed any, that the year 2016 had some redeeming features after all.
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