[throwaway729]

> Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it.

Math is huge. If he does have a Ph.D., he has probably forgotten more named theorems than either of us know. Banach-Tarski is one of those results that, for a pragmatic mathematician who doesn't know it's a meme-y theorem, could go in one ear and out the other.

I'd bet the average avid HN comment reader knows more about Goedel's incompleteness theorems than a big percentage of math phds.

> Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance.

That's not surprising at all. Why would a math Ph.D. have any clue what-so-ever about how to build quantitative finance software?

[lordnacho]

> That's not surprising at all. Why would a math Ph.D. have any clue what-so-ever about how to build quantitative finance software?

Perhaps it's worth me specifying that we were sitting in a quantitative hedge fund, building financial software.