Fischer Black and the revolutionary idea of finance
By: Perry Mehrling.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Hoboken, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 374
Subjects: Black, Fischer, -- 1938-; Finance -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; Economists -- United States -- Biography.; Finance -- Mathematical models.; Investments -- Mathematical models.
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In December of 1997, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes took the stage in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics. Absent from the podium was Fischer Black, the "Black" of the famous Black-Scholes options pricing formula, the formula that was to the derivatives revolution in finance what the discovery of the structure of DNA was to biotechnology. Black had died in 1995, two years short of the ultimate accolade." "Although the options formula made him famous, it was only one of Black's numerous contributions to finance, including portfolio insurance, commodity futures pricing, bond swaps and interest rate futures, and global asset allocation models that have become standard in the world of finance. Amazingly, he did it all despite having no formal training in finance or economics, and despite spending the bulk of his career in business settings. Certainly the most notable non-academic theoretician of modern finance, Fischer Black was one of a kind." "Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance tells the story of one man's intellectual adventure at the very center of modern finance. It is a story about the birth of quantitative finance and financial engineering. It is also the story about the continuing human quest to defeat the "dark forces of time and ignorance," as John Maynard Keynes famously put it. In 1995, the dark forces caught up with Fischer himself, but his quest lives on."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-353) and index.
Table of contents: title: Thou living ray of intellectual fire; title: An idea in the rough; title: Some kind of an education; title: Living up to the model; title: Tortuous economic intuition; title: The money wars; title: Global reach; title: Stagflation; title: Changing fields; title: What do traders do?; title: Exploring general equlibrium.