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Mathematicians are on the warpath, apparently, and it is all Lord Turner’s fault.

At least, that is according to an article in the FT, which says that mathematicians have been seething since Lord Turner blamed "misplaced reliance on sophisticated maths" for lulling banks' top managers into a false sense of security about the risks they were taking. The view of the mathematicians is that, in fact, the maths were not sophisticated enough. Financial institutions paid the piper and called the tune – an oversimplified tune giving the illusion of control.

As someone dedicated to addressing skills gaps, I had been pondering what quantitative skills the industry might really need when I happened to meet Timothy Johnson of Heriot-Watt University, a research fellow whose role it is to champion financial mathematics. Did you even know there was a discipline called financial mathematics? He made an eloquent case for a reassessment in the light of the credit crunch.

Mr Johnson’s point – and if I oversimplify the fault is mine, not his - was that a lot of the graduates with quantitative skills who are snapped up by our industry have the wrong kind of maths. For example, engineers are comfortable with a deterministic universe. As Scotty the Star Trek engineer says, “Ye canna change the laws of physics”. Well, an engineer would say that: a physics professor probably would not - which may be why the City is hoovering up every physicist and mathematician they can get hold of. Apparently, asking most engineers to go and work in a random world – that is a technical term by the way, not a criticism - like financial services is asking for trouble. You need people who are trained in probability and randomness. That is one reason why French and German mathematicians are popular in the City. According to our academic, their training in probability is much more rigorous than the British system, and only a minority of British mathematicians are taught with the same statistical basis.

Whether or not you agree with this view, there are some good examples of firms that do, and have prospered - at least by the standards of the current crunch.

At the time of writing, BNP Paribas seems in good health and is planning to bring new jobs to Scotland. Man Group plc supports the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, which conducts research in quantitative finance, with a particular emphasis on alternative investments, and has attracted world-leading mathematicians.

And even those who might not agree about the need for more sophisticated maths are still worried about the shortfall in quantitative skills. Two years ago, when we surveyed the skills needs of the City, employers were stressing the increasing importance of high-level quantitative skills, as well as their acute shortage. In developing and transferring cutting-edge quantitative and computational finance skills, employers in our sector were often in the vanguard, but were eager to develop partnerships with academia. This was in part because the pool of skilled people was not growing fast enough to keep up with the demand. The supply of home-grown talent in the UK, in particular, was seen as being directly affected by the educational system’s ability to produce highly numerate people.

But that was two years ago, and the financial world has changed out of all recognition. With dwindling numbers of workers, skills shortages are not an issue, are they? Think again. Figures published in April suggest a considerable fall in the numbers of people taking the sort of qualifications that would enable them to work in the City. As in past recessions, this could be storing up major problems for our industry two years into the future. Come the recovery, the skilled people might not be there to make the most of it.

Impressed as I am by the case for financial mathematics, and the academics would agree, there is more to the crisis than the right kind of maths. For some institutions which have crashed, it has been suggested that, even if they had the right kind of quant skills to draw on, they lacked leaders who were prepared to listen and learn. The same FSSC research that flagged the need for quant skills two years ago also told us that employers were worried about another shortage: the need for increasingly sophisticated “soft” skills such as communication, team working, and in particular good management and leadership. There are a number of initiatives that address leadership issues – for example, Lloyd’s has been working with the London Business School to develop a leadership development programme. But there is also the issue of recruiting the right potential.

Failures in leadership have been a recurring theme in the headlines throughout this last rollercoaster year. Clearly the employers we interviewed were more prescient than even they realised. But it would be nice if the next generation of leaders, as well as being good listeners, team workers and ambassadors for the industry, had the right kind of maths as well.

Teresa Sayers is chief executive of Financial Services Skills Council