IBM

4:40 pm : The week's wild ride has concluded, but onlookers might not know it by the relatively mild close had on Friday. The S&P 500 surged almost 12% Monday, suffered its biggest drop since the 1987 crash on Wednesday, and rallied more than 4% Thursday. On Friday alone the index swung nearly 7% from low to high before finishing with a 0.6% loss.

Leland had come to realize that the local arbitrage argument used by Black and Scholes to price options could be extended to actually create options. Rather than create a risk-free return by dynamically hedging an option with stock, as in Black-Scholes, why not reverse the process and create an option by dynamically hedging the stock with a risk-free asset?

During the summer of 1978, while working in France, Leland saw a possible resolution to the volatility problem.

Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher by Daniel H. Steinberg -- After encountering roadblocks from Dell and IBM, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan went to Apple, and 24 hours later, had a commitment to deliver--within two months--the G5's he'd need to build a Supercomputer. At this week's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, Dr. Varadarajan reveals the details behind what it took to build Virginia Tech's G5 Supercomputer. Find out why he says you can expect to see a lot more G5 clusters in the future.