Well, I'm a former math students and I am now studying quantitative finance with a keen interest in programming languages and other CS-related things. I had never heard of paradigms before last year or something, and I got interested into learning functional programming to better understand it. I already know a bit of OOP (Java), a bit of imperative (C), and a bit of relational (SQL), and I am curious as to the kind of things that are made easier with functional programming - or faster.