Myron Scholes
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Myron S. Scholes
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1997
Born: 1 July 1941, Timmins, ON, Canada
Affiliation at the time of the award: Long Term Capital Management, Greenwich, CT, USA
Prize motivation: “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Myron Scholes was born in Ontario, Canada. His family’s business background strongly influenced his interest in economics. As a teenager he lost his mother to cancer, and he had eye problems himself. It was hard for him to read. Instead he had to teach himself to think abstractly and be a good listener. He studied economics at the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate. After a period at MIT, he returned to Chicago, and in 1981 he moved to Stanford. He has two daughters, Anne and Sara, and is married to Jan Scholes.
Work
Myron Scholes is known for his work with colleague Fischer Black on the Black-Scholes option valuation formula, which made options trading more accessible by giving investors a benchmark for valuing. Scholes shared the Economic Sciences Prize with Robert Merton, who generalized the Black-Scholes formula to make it apply to other areas of finance. (Black died in 1995 and was ineligible for the Economic Sciences Prize.)
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