Quantathon Competitors Harness Math Passion
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On Saturday, Feb. 24, undergraduate students from across Carnegie Mellon University participated in Quantathon, an annual math competition hosted by the Quant Club and sponsored by Goldman Sachs.
Students were tasked with solving a series of quantitative finance problems based on a hypothetical casino game, where a coin flip would determine whether a player would win or lose. They were asked how they could maximize winnings and what the probability of winning would be over a certain number of coin flips.
Tze Hng Loke, a junior in computer science and the president of the Quant Club, said that his past participation in Quantathon as a first-year student inspired his interest in quantitative finance.
"The problems are really interesting, and even though the problem-solving process might not have an inherent relation to finance at first glance, there are a lot of situations where you can generalize the problem to finance applications," Loke said. "It's a great way for students interested in quantitative finance to learn more about what the industry entails and what the mathematical aspects behind quantitative finance actually are."
