Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians. - Benoit Mandelbrot

"In the end, he says, his goal is to make the financial system work better and more safely. If the real market worked liked FXTrade, costs would come down, liquidity would rise. "The world economy is like your body," he says. "Your heart pumps six liters of blood a minute, and so if you weigh eighty kilos it would take about fifteen minutes to pump your body's weight. By that analogy, the world foreign exchange markets should be transacting $40 trillion every ten minutes. Today we do $1 trillion or so in twenty-four hours. My claim is the global economy is close to a heart attack.

Regardless, one cannot help but marvel that the movement of security prices, the motion of molecules, and the diffusion of heat could all be of the same mathematical species. As will be seen, it is one of many such strange liaisons in nature.

Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.