Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematicians finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

John Bull can stand many things but can not stand two percent.

If they had told me it was going to be fifteen years, would it have been easier to endure?

We could argue that if we are pricing a complex product that is highly model dependent then the exact definition of the independent variable will be relatively unimportant compared with the choice of model.

Derivatives are like sex. It’s not who we’re sleeping with, it’s who they’re sleeping with that’s the problem.