Nokia Bell Labs

And it's a really interesting and enjoyable book where Emanuel tells us how he went from being a particle physics researcher to a Wall Street quant.

He takes us from his years in academia to Bell Labs and then to Goldman Sachs, where he led the quantitative finance group, innovating in the pricing of derivatives and other complex securities.

Derman's honest descriptions of the pros and cons of Wall Street and the academic world are refreshing.

The book is filled with humanity which will resonate with anyone who's worked in a serious capacity in science or in financial markets.

Coming up with a concrete algorithm to efficiently categorize messages like this, though, takes a certain cleverness.

The story begins in the 1940s, when a young Richard Hamming was working for Bell Labs, and some of his work involved using a very big, expensive punch card computer that he had only limited access to.

And the programs he kept putting through it kept failing.

Finding the right candidate for my small business used to feel like a guessing game.

This was the same foundational paper that showed, in a certain sense, that efficient error correction is always possible, no matter how high the probability of bit flips, at least in theory.

Shannon and Hamming, by the way, shared an office in Bell Labs, despite working on very different things, which hardly seems coincidental here.

Fast forward several decades, and these days, many of us are so immersed in thinking about bits and information that it's easy to overlook just how distinct this way of thinking was.

Ironically, the ideas that most profoundly shape the ways that a future generation thinks will end up looking to that future generation, well, simpler than they really are.

Marty was supposedly an engineer for the Navy in World War II.

And later he worked at Bell Labs, which is like the most famous science lab in America.

The place that invented the transistor.

Hmm?

Then I looked at the St. Louis arch, the courthouse, same distance to the river through the arch.

And I went, what's going on here? Bell Labs, the same guy that designed the St.

Louis arch, the architect, Bell Labs, the same thing with a pond at the other end.

boba lee france boba lee and florence italy the vatican the washington monument the eiffel tower like i started looking it's the same exact layout when you look and i thought what's going on here and honestly since i wrote my book be on site i've discovered so much more because i've been building these it turns out that it's a kilohertz wave so if they took an obelisk an egyptian obelisk and they banged a bunch of drums in the right harmonic around it.

The drum, uh, hurts or the drum sound physically reacts with the quartz in the obelisk and lets off an electric electricity, PZO electricity.

Her successful graduation was followed by a scholarship at Stanford University in California.

The young Swiss woman then landed in the most renowned research and development laboratory in the world at that time, AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, USA.

When I got there and saw the lab, it was totally full of junk.

So the first thing I had to do was clean it all up.

But for a long time, the technology for that was far too complicated.

The lasers were also unstable.

This was the exact problem that Ursula Keller wanted to solve at the AT&T Bell Laboratories.

And she succeeded, by installing a small section of semiconductor into the system that had the same effect as a mirror.

I worked there in the seventies and I worked in Naperville, Illinois.

at Bell Labs, which is actually owned by Western Electric in those days.

This was before the stock split.

I actually quit the company and went to another company in 1980.