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Twenty-five years ago, the quintessential Wall Street trader was a brash risk taker whose actions were motivated by gut instinct and social connections. But in the decades since, the proverbial "gut trader" has been supplanted by a new breed of investor, elite math geniuses—ex-cryptographers, physicists, and game theorists—who've swapped old-style hunches for complicated algorithms and supercomputers. Scott Patterson’s book, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (Crown Business; February 2, 2010) chronicles the story of the quants’ rise, their near-death experience, and their possible against-all-odds resurgence. The "quants" have become the masters of the Wall Street universe, although their grip on power has grown precarious due to their role in setting off a chain of events that nearly destroyed the world’s financial markets.
Scott Patterson is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covering the latest technological advances on Wall Street. This is his first book.