Ever since the end of World War II, some bright minds have been using math and
physics to make predictions about changes in the stock market. Building on the models that have been developed by these quantitative analysts — who are called quants — scientists are opening new windows into the world's financial institutions.
Tonight (Feb. 1), University of California, Irvine, professor James Weatherall will talk about this history and how physics and math play a role in predicting today's stock market. You can listen to his live webcast tonight at 7 p.m. ET on Live Science. His public talk will take place in Ontario at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
"The first person primarily trained as a physicist to apply methods from physics in finance was probably Louis Bachelier, who in 1900 described connections between the probabilities associated with changes in stock prices and the heat equation, which describes how heat spreads, or diffuses, over time," Weatherall told Live Science. Weatherall added that in 1959, another physicist, M.F.M. Osborne, built on Bachelier's idea, "arguing that percentage changes in stock price are analogous to the 'jitters' of a particle of pollen suspended in what is being buffeted from all sides by smaller particles [analogous to bits of information related to a stock] — a process known as Brownian motion." [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics] https://www.livescience.com/57725-physics-of-wall-street-watch-live-webcast.html
