I never expected to be a financial mathematician at an investment bank in London. Back in high school in a country town in Western Australia, I didn’t even consider mathematics as a career path until my maths teacher suggested I go on a summer school maths program. It didn’t appeal immediately, I admit – summer… maths?!? But I was surprised how much I enjoyed the material. It was a pivotal moment – we looked at matrices and their applications to robotics, and the group theory behind Rubik’s cube – I was hooked.

I was taken with the descriptive power of mathematics – particularly when applied to physics. The way mathematical equations could describe observable physical reality seemed tantalising. I decided that I wanted to go as far as I could in understanding what mathematics says about the world around us.

And so, many years later – after a PhD at UQ in applied mathematics and an MSc at Edinburgh in financial mathematics – I am no longer a practising mathematical physicist, but a quantitative analyst. What does that actually mean? I apply techniques from my maths background to pricing financial products like options depending on the behaviour of assets like foreign currencies whose values are described using an interesting blend of calculus and statistics. I use Excel and program in C++, delivering prices to traders in London, New York and Singapore – using mathematics to describe the real world of finance. Most of my colleagues have advanced quantitative degrees and we use methods that were published in journals in the past decade. In the last year I have presented my work at conferences in Greece and Sydney.