user: Is UBS a good bank

assistant: UBS Group AG is a multinational investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Switzerland. Co-headquartered in the cities of Zürich and Basel, it maintains a presence in all major financial centres as the largest Swiss banking institution and the largest private bank in the world. UBS client services are known for their strict bank–client confidentiality and culture of banking secrecy. Because of the bank's large positions in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific markets, the Financial Stability Board considers it a global systemically important bank.

Apart from private banking, UBS provides wealth management, asset management, and investment banking services for private, corporate, and institutional clients with international service. UBS manages the largest amount of private wealth in the world, counting approximately half of the world's billionaires among its clients. Despite its trimming of sell-side operations, UBS maintains a global investment bank and is considered a primary market maker. The bank also maintains numerous underground bank vaults, bunkers, and storage facilities for gold bars around the Swiss Alps and internationally. Partly due to its banking secrecy, it has been at the centre of numerous tax avoidance investigations undertaken by U.S., French, German, Israeli, and Belgian authorities. UBS operations in Switzerland and the United States were respectively ranked first and second on the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index.

As of May 2022, UBS is the third largest bank in Europe with a market capitalization of $63 billion. It is one of the eight global "Bulge Bracket" banks. It has over CHF 3.2 trillion in assets under management (AUM), approximately CHF 2.8 trillion of which are invested assets. In June 2017, its return on invested capital was 11.1%, followed by Goldman Sachs' 9.35%, and JPMorgan Chase's 9.456%. In late 2016, UBS established a blockchain technology research lab in London to advance its cyber security and encryption of client activities. Based on regional deal flow and political influence, UBS is considered one of the "biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world". The company's capital strength, security protocols, and reputation for discretion have yielded a substantial market share in banking and a high level of brand loyalty. Alternatively, it receives routine criticism for facilitating tax noncompliance and off-shore financing. UBS is a primary dealer and Forex counterparty of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

user: Why some believe that continuous optimisation problems might be easier to solve than discrete optimisation problems?

assistant: Some believe that continuous optimisation problems might be easier to solve than their discrete counterparts, owing to the smoothness of the objective functions, which allows the use of calculus techniques. In general, calculus techniques mean to use objective and constraint information at a particular point x, to deduce information about the behaviour of the objective function at all surrounding points close to x. The deduced information is then used to guide the search direction. In contrast, combinatorial optimisation problems are to some extent harder to solve than continuous ones. This is because the behaviour of the objective and constraints may change significantly as we move from one feasible point to another, even if the two points are close according to some measure. Thus it is usually not possible to deduce information about the neighbouring points from the current one.

user: Who is the greatest physicist of all time?

assistant: There have been many great physicists over the years, and while it's not possible to say with certainty who was the 'greatest', Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are very strong contenders for that title.

Isaac Newton (1642-1746) was an English physicist and mathematician  most famous for inventing calculus, classical mechanics. His three laws of classical mechanics successfully predicted the behavior of solid bodies across all observable scales - from the motion of planets to falling apples. For over 250 years his laws were applied with greater and greater precision, always giving the correct answers.

However, in the late 1800s physicists struggled to reconcile measurements of the speed of light with Newton's laws. This one of the observations that led to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-born physicist who revolutionized our understanding of space, time and matter with his theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. His theories of special and general relativity changed our understanding of space and time and successfully explained the motion of light and the behavior of gravity.  His theories of quantum mechanics likewise revolutionized our understand of the sub-atomic world.

In addition to Newton and Einstein there are many other physicists who made groundbreaking discoveries,  including Galileo Galilei, James Clerk Maxwell,  Marie Curie, Neils Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking.