“Paul Wilmott is the smartest of the quants,” says his friend and fellow quant Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “He may be the only smart quant.”

It’s typical hyperbole from the author of The Black Swan, the bestseller about the role of random events in markets and in life, but it is true that Paul Wilmott, publisher and editor in chief of Wilmott, is looking pretty smart these days. Wilmott and his magazine, which is aimed at the quantitative-finance community—the math geeks at banks and hedge funds—foresaw many of the problems that dominate the headlines today. He and the contributors to the magazine, whose influence far outstrips its small circulation, were railing about the limits of math and financial models far in advance of the meltdown.

Wilmott’s bimonthly magazine is at the center of an informal and global quant salon. Its readers are both kinds of quants: the ones who devise and value the derivatives that have caused so much commotion at the banks, and the ones who trade on behalf of hedge funds and were hit hard in the August 2007 downturn. Wilmott is like a technical handbook to the subprime mess and may provide, with any luck, a way out. In its pages, some of the most influential—and financially successful—members of the quant universe gather, many of them deeply skeptical about the instruments their class has created.

The first thing most people notice about Wilmott is the price. At £395, or around $800, a year’s subscription of six issues works out to about $130 an issue. “They get stolen a lot,” Wilmott says. “I’ve heard that a lot of subscribers hide them in their desks as soon as they get them.” Despite the gloom in the markets, Wilmott says, subscriptions—which number about 2,000—have held steady and advertisers, many of whom hawk sophisticated software, have stuck with him. The magazine’s website is the preeminent forum for quants on the internet, with more than 55,000 registered members.

Wilmott is a self-described contrarian and, in a way, Wilmott and its contributors call into question the whole enterprise of quantitative finance, doubting the usefulness of its vaunted models, particularly their ability to predict or value anything. The magazine has published attacks on every aspect of the modeling that gives value to derivatives.

“But we’re still promoting quantitative finance,” Wilmott says, after I ask him if there isn’t something odd about a magazine that seems bent on undermining its own field. “We believe in it, and we believe in math, even now. I’d like to quantify everything. A world expressed in mathematics would be a better world, in my opinion.” As Wilmott forges on through the crisis, its mission is to keep questioning specious theories and find out what actually works.

Quantitative finance may be at a 20-year low, but it is not going away. Too much of the financial world’s machinery now runs on it.

There are other journals for quants, but Wilmott’s odd wit, surprisingly beautiful design, and star-studded list of contributors make it special, even for nonquants. In the November 2007 issue, Ed Thorp wrote a piece called “Investing in Hedge Funds.” To have Thorp writing about that topic is like getting advice on how to run an insurance company from Warren Buffett. Thorp, now 75, is among the oldest and most successful of the quants. He ran hedge funds for decades and says he has averaged a 20 percent return, after fees, over the past 30 years. He taught math at M.I.T. and invented the modern version of card counting, chronicled in his bestseller on blackjack, Beat the Dealer.

Each copy of Wilmott is 11 inches square, runs about 100 pages, and is printed on expensive glossy paper. The covers are designed by Liam Larkin, a graphic artist based in London, and they are often darkly funny. The March 2007 cover, which appeared before two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed and kicked off the subprime crisis, shows a bird’s-eye view of a teacup with leaves at the bottom in the shape of the Grim Reaper. The January 2008 issue features a Japanese-style print of a tsunami with a little house perched atop it.

Wilmott, found recently in his London office, is a trim 5 foot 9, has sandy brown hair, and wears glasses with heavy black rectangular rims. He is 48 but looks 38. “Math is supposed to keep you young,” he says. “At least mathematicians like to think so.” He is the author of a three-volume, 1,500-page anchor of a book called Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance. The latest edition lists for $295. He has written two other books and edited about 10 more, all of which are attempts to explain the high-level math underlying the derivatives that have dominated Wall Street in the past decade.