This morning I watched an interview with Benoît Mandelbrot, a French American mathematician best known as the father of fractal geometry, conducted by John Authers, a leading journalist working for the Financial Times. Now in his mid-eighties, Mandelbrot has long been critical of the efficient-market hypothesis, which stems from the work of Louis Bachelier, a French mathematician best known for his model of the stochastic process known as Brownian motion, which he applied to financial markets. Mandelbrot argues that events in financial markets are discontinuous, and that stochastic processes introduced by Bachelier cannot model such discontinuities. The interview comes in two short clips in the online edition of the newspaper, but their effect on me has been tremendous. There are breathtaking problems to tackle out there, but look at poor old me! In my dotage, I have become embroiled in the study of something as utterly irrelevant as endemic corruption in Croatia!