Navigating stock market crashes in the Brexit- Trump era
THE FIELDS CENTRE FOR FINANCIAL INDUSTRIES arranged for Bill Ziemba to give a public lecture on Wednesday September 20, 2017 at the Fields Institute. Dr. Ziemba is Professor Emeritus at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, and is currently a Distinguished Visiting Research Associate at the London School of Economics.
Titled " Navigating stock market crashes in the Brexit-Trump era ", the talk centred on work( joint with Sebastian Lleo and Mikhail Zhitlukin) that forms the basis for his recent book
New Frontiers in Complex Dynamics: From One to Several Variables
THE WORKSHOP ON NEW FRONTIERS in Complex Dynamics: From One to Several Variables brought together a vibrant community of researchers in the field, with many younger mathematicians, graduate students, and postdocs in attendance. Sixty-six mathematicians registered, and some of the lectures were attended by more than seventy people!
The workshop opened with a comprehensive talk from Misha Lyubich on dissipative complex Hénon maps. These maps can be viewed as perturbations of one-dimensional quadratic polynomials, and understanding the similarities and differences between the one- and two-dimensional cases has led much of the recent development of the field. In his talk, Lyubich overviewed several themes in this area that have been advanced in recent years. Over the course of the conference, these themes were expanded upon by many speakers.
In contrast to dissipative Hénon maps, the dynamics of conservative Hénon maps is quite mysterious, since onedimensional intuition mostly does not apply. Eric Bedford gave an overview of some of the beautiful puzzles awaiting in this area which led to a lively discussion during the conference,
" Stock market crashes: big and small and what to do about them ". In particular, they try to understand stock price bubbles, and have developed a risk measure aimed at predicting crashes in the stock market. Dr. Ziemba described how this risk measure would have performed in a number of recent market downturns, and compared it to the predictive tools that have already been developed by others. Being a public lecture, the talk didn’ t dwell on technical details. Instead, it shared interesting stories about Dr. Ziemba’ s many years spent as both an academic and a money manager, along with anecdotes about the colorful and outspoken friends and colleagues he has worked with( or in opposition to) over that time. �
and will without a doubt lead to much future work.
One of the highlights of the workshop was a talk by 1962 Fields medallist, Wolf and Abel prize winner, John Milnor, about his work in progress with Araceli Bonifant. They study a moduli space of projective isomorphism classes of algebraic curves in the projective plane, but have to deal with the difficulty that the action of the automorphism group of P2 on the appropriate space of curves is not proper.
— Tom Salisbury
On Tuesday evening, the participants had the pleasure of witnessing the stunning spectacle of the sunset over the Toronto skyline, as seen from the Kajama, a traditional 165 foot three-mast schooner. Many fond memories were made during the workshop, and, without a doubt, many new mathematical breakthroughs will follow from this activity. �
Check the Fields Youtube channel for a video interview with John Milnor.
— Michael Yampolsky
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