There's a number of things to disentangle in that post. 1). The domain you posted is for sale and appears to be broken or slow. Given it uses aspx and a Micros

There's a number of things to disentangle in that post. 1). The domain you posted is for sale and appears to be broken or slow. Given it uses aspx and a Microsoft stack that's ten years out of date I'd say it's perfectly representative of the state of the larger finance industry. 2). What is a quant. Depends on the job. I was hired as a quant for risk management then got switched to algos when the pm found out I have a lot of hard real time experience with Linux. The first job was all discrete math, the second was optimizing x86 assembly. 3). Credential inflation is real. The application of the maths you talked about was something I saw first hand. The assumptions under which the formal models would work were so thread bare a stiff breeze would tear them down quote Keynes: >The object of our analysis is, not to provide a machine, or method of blind manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide ourselves with an organised and orderly method of thinking out particular problems; and, after we have reached a provisional conclusion by isolating the complicating factors one by one, we then have to go back on ourselves and allow, as well as we can, for the probable interactions of the factors amongst themselves. This is the nature of economic thinking. Any other way of applying our formal principles of thought (without which, however, we shall be lost in the wood) will lead us into error. It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods of formalising a system of economic analysis, such as we shall set down in section vi of this chapter, that they expressly assume strict independence between the factors involved and lose all their cogency and authority if this hypothesis is disallowed; whereas, in ordinary discourse, where we are not blindly manipulating but know all the time what we are doing and what the words mean, we can keep 'at the back of our heads' the necessary reserves and qualifications and the adjustments which we shall have to make later on, in a way in which we cannot keep complicated partial differentials 'at the back' of several pages of algebra which assume that they all vanish. Too large a proportion of recent 'mathematical' economics are merely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols. The above is still excellent advice, most often never followed. Of course the lunch talks we had were very interesting, completely divorced from reality, but very interesting. 4). Most undergrads will never see the mathematics. True. But some will. My numerical methods 4th year project was a symplectic integrator for the gravitational interaction between Jupiter, Mars, the Sun and the asteroid belt. It wasn't new research, the results were known 50 years ago, but it was on par with the state of the art in industry in terms of complexity of implementation (cleanness of implementation was a completely different thing, while not spaghetti code it's rightly never seen the light of day).