Scott Patterson's "The Quants"

I recently purchased Scott Patterson's new book, "The Quants," about the excerpt of which I wrote here.

So far, about 1/5th of the way through Patterson's work, I would give it a huge, unequivocal "buy and hold" rating.

The excerpt was a very representative sample of his writing. But the book is much, much better than the excerpt could possibly convey.

Patterson writes in a style reminiscent of Michael Lewis crossed with Tom Wolfe. He digs deeply into the roots of quantitative trading, providing very interesting stories of Ed Thorp and his own mathematical predecessors.

Having worked at AT&T, and knowing of Claude Shannon's impact on information theory and computing, I was delighted to read of his chance involvement with Thorpe's own early work.

In any case, my early verdict is that the book is well worth buying/reading.