For a while now I’ve been planning to write a blog post about pricing financial instruments using Monte Carlo techniques in F#. As part of this I needed to generate normally distributed random numbers, and while putting together the code to do it I realised it was interesting enough to warrant its own post.

I’m making use of a few F#/.NET idioms to make the process easier. For instance, sequences (.NET’s IEnumerable) are used as the source of uniformly distributed random numbers. Also, to verify that the resulting numbers are actually normally distributed, we can easily use existing WPF/silverlight controls to visualise the values direct from within Visual Studio, in a manner similar to this previous post – but without having to write the plotting code ourselves.
Continue reading Generating and plotting random numbers →