From ancient times, even before formal mathematics arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia to regulate plantings, water resources (...) The emphasis in financial markets was on prediction, using exotic mathematical tools (…) At the same time, we seem to have inherited from primitive peoples what Dirk Struik, a historian of mathematics, called “the love of very large numbers (…)
This is the fourth essay by Norman Gal on financial crises. The first three are available electronically in PDF format: Money, Greed, and Technology (2008), Brazil and the Asia Crisis (1998, in Portuguese) and Brazil, Japan, Russia (1998, in Portuguese).