[fancyfredbot]

The days of doing some calculus, having a moment of brilliant insight, and writing down a pricing formula then getting paid millions probably only ever existed in people's imagination.

Fancy math definitely is part of derivatives pricing. However financial world has become too complicated for simple models. Adding things like the risk of counterparty default to your pricing equation quickly leads you into the world of equations without closed form solutions. The common approach these days is some kind of huge multi factor Monte Carlo model. These are still solving pricing equations but the challenge is more about numerical methods than brilliant algebraic gymnastics.