Did Mathematics Really Blow Up Wall Street?

Paul Embrechts is Professor of Mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and, not surprisingly for a Swiss-based mathematician, is an expert in financial risk management. He was warning about the limitations of some of the mathematical models used in finance long before most of us had heard of "collatoralised debt obligations". In this talk, Prof Embrechts will review want went wrong, why it went wrong and how, by finance and mathematicians working more closely, another credit crisis can be avoided in the future.