Over the last summer, I intern-ed at the technology division of a financial firm. I worked with the fixed income options desk, and my project involved developing software that would analyze and display financial data, such as yield curve cooking, profit and loss attribution, and risk analyses. I remember being incredibly unfamiliar with all these […]

There have been many incidents where bad numerical computing practices have led to massive financial and structural losses. Poor handling of rounding errors led to the Patriot Missile failure in Dharan Saudi Arabia on February 25 1991, and an integer overflow led to the explosion of the Ariane rocket just after lift-off on its maiden […]