Emanuel Derman
Quantitative analyst and physicist
Emanuel Derman is a South African-born physicist who became a Wall Street quantitative analyst. He wrote My Life as a Quant, about moving from physics to finance.
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American Born 1945 in Cape Town, South Africa
About Emanuel Derman
Emanuel Derman was born in South Africa and has spent most of his working life in New York City. He started as a theoretical physicist and earned his PhD at Columbia University. During the 1980s he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he created programming languages meant for modeling business problems. From 1985 to 2002 he worked on Wall Street, leading quantitative research groups, and he became a managing director at Goldman Sachs in 1997. He helped create two models that industry now uses widely: Black-Derman-Toy, for interest rates, and Derman-Kani, for local volatility. My Life as a Quant came out in 2004 and was named one of Business Week's top ten books of that year. Derman has also taught at Columbia University, where he directed the financial engineering program.