Two stories about Fisher Black. He was my first finance professor at MIT, teaching course 15.401 at the Sloan School. This was 1978. He stood in front of the room each class and droned on about CAPM and potential market implications and at the end of every class, he said, "throwing darts at the stock market listings is the most efficient way to construct a portfolio and nobody will ever beat the average consistently." or something along those lines. He was not a particularly effective teacher, but at that point, was reasonably well known because of Black-Scholes.
regarding the B-S model, the story I heard was that he and Scholes were stumped on developing the model and he was at lunch in the professor's cafeteria describing the problem to a physics professor friend who made the connection with the Fourier equation for him! not sure if that is true, but it was widely known and accepted on campus at the time.
Two stories about Fisher Black. He was my first finance professor at MIT, teaching course 15.401 at the Sloan School. This was 1978. He stood in front of the room each class and droned on about CAPM and potential market implications and at the end of every class, he said, "throwing darts at the stock market listings is the most efficient way to construct a portfolio and nobody will ever beat the average consistently." or something along those lines. He was not a particularly effective teacher, but at that point, was reasonably well known because of Black-Scholes.
regarding the B-S model, the story I heard was that he and Scholes were stumped on developing the model and he was at lunch in the professor's cafeteria describing the problem to a physics professor friend who made the connection with the Fourier equation for him! not sure if that is true, but it was widely known and accepted on campus at the time.