Pricing the Future Finance, Physics, and the 300-year Journey to the Black-Scholes Equation

by Szpiro, George G

• ISBN13: 9780465022489
• ISBN10: 0465022480
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-29
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

Options have been traded for hundreds of years, but investment decisions were based on gut feelings until the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Black-Scholes options pricing model in 1973 ushered in the era of the "quants." Wall Street would never be the same. In Pricing the Future, financial economist George G. Szpiro tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists who looked for a way to explain the movement of atoms and molecules, Pricing the Futureretraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

Author Biography

George G. Szpiro is a mathematician, financial economist, and journalist. He is the Israel correspondent of the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung and has published in Science, Nature, and the Jerusalem Report. He is the author of Kepler's Conjecture, The Secret Life of Numbers, Poincaré's Prize, and Numbers Rule. He lives in Switzerland.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. xi
Flowers and Spices	p. 1
In the Beginning	p. 21
From Rags to Riches	p. 37
The Banker's Secretary	p. 55
The Spurned Professor	p. 73
Botany, Physics, and Chemistry	p. 81
Disco Dancers and Strobe Lights	p. 109
The Overlooked Thesis	p. 125
Another Pioneer	p. 137
Measuring the Immeasurable	p. 143
Accounting for Randomness	p. 161
The Sealed Envelope	p. 169
The Utility of Logarithms	p. 181
The Nobelists	p. 195
The Three Musketeers	p. 211
The Higher They Climb	p. 229
The Harder They Fall	p. 241
The Long Tail	p. 255
Appendix	p. 259
Notes	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 277
Index	p. 283
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