b'People arent interested in facts, Jack Kerouac wrote in his journal in December 1949.The spontaneous prose and autobiographical fictional travelogue of Kerouacs On the Road, and the original scroll version from which the popularized novel was adapted, are more important as a myth or a cultural marker than as a novel. 10Today, venture capital unicorns and hedge fund managers who make$1 billion per year are more important as myths or cultural markers than as economic indicators. 11Plastic micro-particles in high-elevation Alpine and Rocky Mountain snowmelt are mythic markers, in addition to being particular ecological factlets. The Gaussian copula formula seems mythic to some. 12The language of gods:10 As cited by Scott Staton in Neal Cassady: American Muse, Holy Fool (The New Yorker, December 12, 2012) 11 Reporting publicly the results of its $400 million venture capital portfolio, the Kauffman Foundation found that the lure of the venture capital story obscured subpar financial returns.12 From Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street (Wired, February 23, 2009): It was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial econo-mistseven Wall Street quantshave received the Nobel in economics before, and Lis work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nutdetermining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are relatedand cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiq-uitous in finance worldwide.For five years, Lis formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenchedand was making people so much moneythat warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.Then the model fell apart. 58'