I had the good fortune of meeting Barone-Adesi today, the man behind the closed form solution for american option. I managed to speak to him about 15 min and was amazed by his enthusiasm and the way he could connect ideas from fluid dynamics, physics, mathematics, fractal geometry. He cautioned me not to think about doing anything on the American option side as he had spent a pretty long time on the field and felt that there are more interesting things to look at in the non-american option side of things.

He was also not too kicked about fractal finance which Mr. Taleb seems to be all praise for it. Apparantly, he had spent 4 years on it and his take on it was -“We need sophisticated technology to work on fractal finance, which is not the current state of affairs” … I was inspired by the way he talked about finance and various theories . While he was leaving, he gave one general suggestion - “Theorize less, Experiment More”..same as what Paul Graham says..