Founding

In the fall of 2006, Varun Dube began talking to several people regarding a mutual vested interest in quantitative finance. The original idea was to apply mathematics and finance computationally, and the idea struck him while taking a statistics course, feeling that modeling many of the techniques that are taught would be a wholesome learning experience. He found support from his classmates Jawad Ahmed and Haseeb Chowdhry and decided to consult with club leaders and members. The reception was mixed, with some young Stern students such as Alexandru Savoiu, Arvindh Rao, and Eric Ho showing immediate appreciation of the idea while older students were more wary.

Almost providentially, a senior student, Igor Schmertzler, burst onto the scene and provided guidance over a Skype VoIP session. The founders decided that talk would never convince the Stern community to support an avant-garde club, but rather concrete actions would be the new voice. A board meeting was quickly organized, and over the next few weeks, a concrete vision slowly formed. The founders had different preferences in the industry—some very adept at computer science, some very enthusiastic about mathematics, and others formidable at financial theory. This ensured that no one vision would dominate and doom the nascent club but that the combination of visions would provide members with a diverse experience.

The first historic meeting of The Quantitative Finance Society was launched on the 6th of February. Attendance was 52 students for this pioneering club with little influential power. The presentation “Math Probably Sucks,” about the lack of enough reliable data and falling back on mathematical approximations to make up for this, was well received by the audience. Following this meeting, Igor once again stepped up to present a discussion on decision trees. Once again, the audience was very receptive and an engaging conversation followed the meeting, and weekly meetings of QFS gradually grew to become a prominent organization within the Stern community.