My Life as a Speculative Realist - Metal Forming and Quant Finance

We have extended our authors list. The additional curators will chronicle our inter-theme experiences especially on Mondays.

So, I shall write posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I have been invited by a renowned machine tool maker to attend their strategic product development workshop - tomorrow. It is about machine intelligence of metal forming machines. I am quite proud that they trust I can contribute.


About the background I have written in The Blank Swan of Free Metal Forming.

It is about uninformative in advance material properties and the need to extract them from the process behavior in order to recalibrate the PDEs derived from the elastoplasticity theory constantly.

Tomorrow, we will discuss, how to add adaptive control features to their next machine generation.

The philosophy of speculative realism

It is said: maths is the "language of nature". It is used to represent (physical) reality. Tested and verified in experiments, it enables predictive models forecasting very precise future behavior of a physical system. Real maths - what a great concept?

And if we do not know more properties of a real behavior than represented in our models, our model ARE reality. 

But "real" and, say, economic and financial modeling are not so different, because the behavior of the physical system is often not so predictable, as we think and it matters what context we write into it.

As mentioned earlier our cross-sectoral maths matters not only because of its methodologies, but the paradigms including the treatment of inverse problems.

Harnessing the power of feedback loops

Before I knew what speculative realism is, I was confronted with such problems: how to use information about the process / market dynamic and the impact of actions to change them. It is quality and risk management.

Inverting is difficult but indispensable ("invert, always invert" (to solve the problem), said Jacobi). We ride the waves of bending forces or derivatives prices …

I am looking forward to the workshop tomorrow and sorry, for posting today.