- Joined
- 5/2/06
- Messages
- 12,165
- Points
- 273
Since its beginning in 2003, Quantnet has grown from just a handful of people to over 12,000 registered members. Over the past 7 years, as a global leading resource dedicated to financial engineering education, Quantnet has become a thriving community and a unique knowledge hub for generations of budding quantitative finance professionals.
This month marks our 7th anniversary so we dug deep into our history and pulled together some of the most entertaining facts about our community that we could find. Here are 10 that you might not know.
1. Quantnet was Originally Hosted on a Small Bedroom Computer
Very few people knew that when Quantnet was first set up in 2003 as a private discussion board for students studying Financial Engineering, it had no domain name and ran from a computer in the bedroom of @Phat Loc, the first administrator of the site.
Members would access the site to discuss homework, coding projects using an address setup by Phat with the help of Dynamic DNS service. With only a simple DSL line, whenever there was a problem with this tiny computer, we can only imagine the disruption it caused to members who grew dependent on the site.
Being a technical savvy person, Phat built and maintained the site using many open source software such as Mambo and phpBB.
Phat Loc is now a successful trader at an investment bank. Whenever we meet him and talk about Quantnet, his bedroom computer story is one that got mentioned often and usually results in few chuckles and good laughs.
2. Quantnet.org was Our Main Address until 2009
Fast forward to 2005 and it was decided that a little bedroom computer was no longer a good way to run a website, a search for a domain was put in place. Since we had called it Quantnet from the beginning, it only made sense to use the same name on our domain. Unfortunately, the .com domain was taken leading to us taking .org, the next best available extension. According to Whois, quantnet.org was officially registered in Feb, 2005
For many of our earliest members, Quantnet.org has been an integral part of their lives and long after we began using the .com domain, they still type .org out of old habit.
3. We obtained Quantnet.com in 2009
As mentioned above, the current domain wasn't available in 2005 when we set out to get our domain of choice. Further investigation reveals that the quantnet.com domain was registered back in 1997, went through several owners, but at some point between April 2003 and August 2003, it became property of the hosting server.
When we reached out to Anton Fokin who was listed as the last known owner of Quantnet.com in 2003 and who also owns several similar domains at the time, he told us that "we were running QuantNet Limited company in UK with my partners. Someone forgot to pay for the site when we dropped the company. This is our story of quantnet.com".
This explains why the domain became a place holder for several years until we purchased it in 2009.
If you read this How to Snatch an Expiring Domain » Mike Industries, it's clear the obstacles some would go through to obtain a domain name that somebody else owns. Even if the owner outright abandons it, chances are you will pay a dear price to get it. So you can imagine the delights we had when we discovered the missing piece of our domain was available for a price. We paid quite a bit of money for the domain but you can't put a price tag on having the chance to finally get the prized .com domain for your business. It's fortunate and a bit of luck for us to be able to obtain the domain when we are able to do so.
Smarting up from the lesson, we currently own all important extensions (org, net, info, us, etc) and have them redirecting to quantnet.com.
4. The Origin and Meaning behind Quantnet Logo
The logo was designed by Luka Pensa, an artist from Croatia who owns a design studio called Mis i Pile. Quantnet first approached him in April 2007 but the design was not commissioned until late 2009 when it took two months, several drafts, concepts, and numerous email exchanges to complete.
We got asked a few times what does the logo mean? And what kind of animal is it in our logo?
The final logo of a young bull is symbolic of the members who make up the Quantnet community. It represents a demographic of young, educated professionals who are determined to begin their journey into the world of quantitative finance. They are here to stay and will be the forces behind many more future bull markets.
5. Quantnet Wiki began as a NYU-Baruch Collaborative Project
Unbeknown to most students, there are ongoing discussions among MFE programs at the director level to collaborate on educational projects. That's specially true among programs based in New York City due to its close proximity. One of those discussions was in 2007 between Peter Carr, then Director of NYU Courant Mathematical Finance program and Dan Stefanica, Director of Baruch MFE program. The talk arose from a need to have a centralized place to host information for the NYC-based quant finance programs. When we got wind of the idea, we created wiki for a handful of the local programs. As they say, the rest is history.
Now three years after we first set up, the wiki contains two dozen entries for MFE programs from around the country. Many of these entries are edited by the programs' director and their staff. We hope to promote the use of this wiki feature to our members and expand the programs it covers. If you don't see your program listed there, please feel free to create one.
6. Origin of Quantnet Program Reviews
Many of the ideas we have around here came directly from our members in respond to a specific need. It would then come as no surprise that one of the best features we have here was also idea of one of our members.
At the end of 2009, Chris Dolan, then a recent graduate of the NYU-Courant Mathematical Finance program suggested to us that it would benefit our members if we organize a series of student reviews of MFE programs. Chris offered to start it off and until today, his very first review of the NYU MathFin program was one of the most comprehensive and well-written submissions we ever received.
Today, our Review section contains over 100 entries for over two dozen MFE programs.
7. Quantnet Serves Over 50,000 Visitors a Month
Along with our steady growth in membership, we have seen an exponential increase in our web traffic. For all the talk about how we started out in 2003, Quantnet really was a private, little known website and the public had no idea it even existed. Back in 2006 when we started working on open up the site for the public, a good month would see at most 300 visitors. Then we decided to pull our sleeves up, pour our hearts out and work like crazy to make this community a useful resource for all involved.
8. Tim Grant was the First Quantnet Interviewee
Since 2008, Quantnet has interviewed many practitioners, academics for our Interview feature. The list is impressive by any mean. They include well-known academics such as Peter Carr, Steven Shreve, practitioners such as Jim Gatheral, Daniel Duffy, Ernie Chan, Sylvain Raynes, head hunter (Dominic Connor).
We owe it to the man who started it all. His name is Tim Grant, a former Managing Director of UBS. I met him during an information visit to UBS Stamford trading facility in Aug 2007 and was impressed enough with his enthusiasm for quant students to follow up with him for a formal interview.
It took until Dec of 2007 for him to clear with UBS corp comm to agree to proceed with Quantnet interview. The whole process took two months and we published his interview in Feb 2008. The resulting interview proved to be such a smashing success that we keep it a permanent feature on our site.
Tim is no longer with UBS but we still keep in touch with him and look forward to his contribution in the near future.
9. First Quantnet Chats were held via IRC
For members of this Facebook, Twitter generation, IRC is a term they may not have heard about. In fact, it was one of the oldest text messaging protocols used since the early '90s. According to this Wikipedia article, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup and during the Gulf War.
10. Highest Ranking Official to Comment on our Article
We do investigative pieces on issues that are important and of relevance to our audience such as dramatic changes in personnel, trend in admission statistics at the top MFE programs, emerging quant career tracks on Wall Street. Many of the most interesting leads came from our members who tipped us with invaluable information.
One of those tips came in March 2010 that the director of the Chicago Mathematical Finance program got fired. Weeks of following up with numerous past and recent graduates of the program as well as representatives of the university and department results in our biggest article to date, Chicago MSFM - Seeking changes, Chicago MSFM fired founding director.
The responses were immediate from many people associated with the program. We got emails from the head of Public Relationship of the university. Dean Robert Fefferman even commented publicly on the article. To date, he is the highest profile university official that ever responded to our articles.
To set another record, the article itself receives 68 comments as of today, the most ever on Quantnet.
This month marks our 7th anniversary so we dug deep into our history and pulled together some of the most entertaining facts about our community that we could find. Here are 10 that you might not know.
1. Quantnet was Originally Hosted on a Small Bedroom Computer
Very few people knew that when Quantnet was first set up in 2003 as a private discussion board for students studying Financial Engineering, it had no domain name and ran from a computer in the bedroom of @Phat Loc, the first administrator of the site.
Members would access the site to discuss homework, coding projects using an address setup by Phat with the help of Dynamic DNS service. With only a simple DSL line, whenever there was a problem with this tiny computer, we can only imagine the disruption it caused to members who grew dependent on the site.
Being a technical savvy person, Phat built and maintained the site using many open source software such as Mambo and phpBB.
Phat Loc is now a successful trader at an investment bank. Whenever we meet him and talk about Quantnet, his bedroom computer story is one that got mentioned often and usually results in few chuckles and good laughs.
2. Quantnet.org was Our Main Address until 2009
Fast forward to 2005 and it was decided that a little bedroom computer was no longer a good way to run a website, a search for a domain was put in place. Since we had called it Quantnet from the beginning, it only made sense to use the same name on our domain. Unfortunately, the .com domain was taken leading to us taking .org, the next best available extension. According to Whois, quantnet.org was officially registered in Feb, 2005
For many of our earliest members, Quantnet.org has been an integral part of their lives and long after we began using the .com domain, they still type .org out of old habit.
3. We obtained Quantnet.com in 2009
As mentioned above, the current domain wasn't available in 2005 when we set out to get our domain of choice. Further investigation reveals that the quantnet.com domain was registered back in 1997, went through several owners, but at some point between April 2003 and August 2003, it became property of the hosting server.
When we reached out to Anton Fokin who was listed as the last known owner of Quantnet.com in 2003 and who also owns several similar domains at the time, he told us that "we were running QuantNet Limited company in UK with my partners. Someone forgot to pay for the site when we dropped the company. This is our story of quantnet.com".
This explains why the domain became a place holder for several years until we purchased it in 2009.
If you read this How to Snatch an Expiring Domain » Mike Industries, it's clear the obstacles some would go through to obtain a domain name that somebody else owns. Even if the owner outright abandons it, chances are you will pay a dear price to get it. So you can imagine the delights we had when we discovered the missing piece of our domain was available for a price. We paid quite a bit of money for the domain but you can't put a price tag on having the chance to finally get the prized .com domain for your business. It's fortunate and a bit of luck for us to be able to obtain the domain when we are able to do so.
Smarting up from the lesson, we currently own all important extensions (org, net, info, us, etc) and have them redirecting to quantnet.com.
4. The Origin and Meaning behind Quantnet Logo
The logo was designed by Luka Pensa, an artist from Croatia who owns a design studio called Mis i Pile. Quantnet first approached him in April 2007 but the design was not commissioned until late 2009 when it took two months, several drafts, concepts, and numerous email exchanges to complete.
We got asked a few times what does the logo mean? And what kind of animal is it in our logo?
The final logo of a young bull is symbolic of the members who make up the Quantnet community. It represents a demographic of young, educated professionals who are determined to begin their journey into the world of quantitative finance. They are here to stay and will be the forces behind many more future bull markets.
5. Quantnet Wiki began as a NYU-Baruch Collaborative Project
Unbeknown to most students, there are ongoing discussions among MFE programs at the director level to collaborate on educational projects. That's specially true among programs based in New York City due to its close proximity. One of those discussions was in 2007 between Peter Carr, then Director of NYU Courant Mathematical Finance program and Dan Stefanica, Director of Baruch MFE program. The talk arose from a need to have a centralized place to host information for the NYC-based quant finance programs. When we got wind of the idea, we created wiki for a handful of the local programs. As they say, the rest is history.
Now three years after we first set up, the wiki contains two dozen entries for MFE programs from around the country. Many of these entries are edited by the programs' director and their staff. We hope to promote the use of this wiki feature to our members and expand the programs it covers. If you don't see your program listed there, please feel free to create one.
6. Origin of Quantnet Program Reviews
Many of the ideas we have around here came directly from our members in respond to a specific need. It would then come as no surprise that one of the best features we have here was also idea of one of our members.
At the end of 2009, Chris Dolan, then a recent graduate of the NYU-Courant Mathematical Finance program suggested to us that it would benefit our members if we organize a series of student reviews of MFE programs. Chris offered to start it off and until today, his very first review of the NYU MathFin program was one of the most comprehensive and well-written submissions we ever received.
Today, our Review section contains over 100 entries for over two dozen MFE programs.
7. Quantnet Serves Over 50,000 Visitors a Month
Along with our steady growth in membership, we have seen an exponential increase in our web traffic. For all the talk about how we started out in 2003, Quantnet really was a private, little known website and the public had no idea it even existed. Back in 2006 when we started working on open up the site for the public, a good month would see at most 300 visitors. Then we decided to pull our sleeves up, pour our hearts out and work like crazy to make this community a useful resource for all involved.
8. Tim Grant was the First Quantnet Interviewee
Since 2008, Quantnet has interviewed many practitioners, academics for our Interview feature. The list is impressive by any mean. They include well-known academics such as Peter Carr, Steven Shreve, practitioners such as Jim Gatheral, Daniel Duffy, Ernie Chan, Sylvain Raynes, head hunter (Dominic Connor).
We owe it to the man who started it all. His name is Tim Grant, a former Managing Director of UBS. I met him during an information visit to UBS Stamford trading facility in Aug 2007 and was impressed enough with his enthusiasm for quant students to follow up with him for a formal interview.
It took until Dec of 2007 for him to clear with UBS corp comm to agree to proceed with Quantnet interview. The whole process took two months and we published his interview in Feb 2008. The resulting interview proved to be such a smashing success that we keep it a permanent feature on our site.
Tim is no longer with UBS but we still keep in touch with him and look forward to his contribution in the near future.
9. First Quantnet Chats were held via IRC
For members of this Facebook, Twitter generation, IRC is a term they may not have heard about. In fact, it was one of the oldest text messaging protocols used since the early '90s. According to this Wikipedia article, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup and during the Gulf War.
10. Highest Ranking Official to Comment on our Article
We do investigative pieces on issues that are important and of relevance to our audience such as dramatic changes in personnel, trend in admission statistics at the top MFE programs, emerging quant career tracks on Wall Street. Many of the most interesting leads came from our members who tipped us with invaluable information.
One of those tips came in March 2010 that the director of the Chicago Mathematical Finance program got fired. Weeks of following up with numerous past and recent graduates of the program as well as representatives of the university and department results in our biggest article to date, Chicago MSFM - Seeking changes, Chicago MSFM fired founding director.
The responses were immediate from many people associated with the program. We got emails from the head of Public Relationship of the university. Dean Robert Fefferman even commented publicly on the article. To date, he is the highest profile university official that ever responded to our articles.
To set another record, the article itself receives 68 comments as of today, the most ever on Quantnet.
