I am over 60 and I am still a student.
Meeting people with bright ideas and deep knowledge at a conference always triggers a phase of informing, investigating, exploring and constructing knowledge (sometimes brooding).
At the Frankfurt MathFinance conference I enjoyed to talk with experts about models and methods, but inevitably (the transtec Tesla machine on our booth could not be overlooked) also about the influence of the new computing muscles on quantitative finance.
It came in my mind that in the early stages of geometric modeling (1970ies) limited computing power built a barrier when manipulating solid objects especially if their bounded geometry were sculptured. After the graphics workstation revolution (later 1980ies), I could design more complex geometric primitives and structure geometric complexes by applying boolean operations on those primitives. I wrote little grammars that organized the creation automatically. Lacking the technology, with more effort than in Twisted Architecture.
With this in hand, I could create all type of complex geometric models and got insight in what is possible, aesthetic, minimalist, ... I was a an architect of synthetic objects.
Now free form geometry buildings are really built by architects (as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao)
When calibration and valuation engines do not build a barrier to structure and analyze all type of financial instruments in-time, test them across scenarios automatically, visualize the results dynamically, ... they will not only become a valuation and risk management tool, but a tool to get deeper insight and understanding of the universe of structured products?
And in the future, we might have an economic framework to actually build and trade the most attractive?
In UnRisk we exploit the strongest computing muscles to do the number crunching in-time and provide high level construction languages for synthetic and real building and valuing.
