Fischer Black

Fischer Black (1938 to 1995) was an American economist with a doctorate in applied mathematics from Harvard University, best known as one of the co-authors of the Black-Scholes option pricing model. He was born in Washington, D.C., studied physics at Harvard College, and moved through mathematics and early artificial intelligence research before turning to finance. He worked at the consultancy Bolt, Beranek and Newman and at Arthur D. Little, held academic posts at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from 1984 worked at Goldman Sachs, where he directed the Quantitative Strategies Group. Besides option pricing he contributed to work on the capital asset pricing model and proposed ideas in monetary economics and business cycle theory. He died in 1995; the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences went to his collaborator Myron Scholes and to Robert C. Merton, and because the prize is not awarded posthumously Black was not eligible for it.