John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern
The Game Behind Risk
There are encounters that only seem like historical necessities in hindsight. In 1935, the Viennese economist Oskar Morgenstern published an essay on perfect foresight and economic equilibrium. His…
Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert C. Merton
How Options Became Calculable
There are scientific breakthroughs that, in hindsight, seem so inevitable that one might think they were bound to happen. In the case of Black, Scholes, and Merton, the opposite is closer to the…
Louis Bachelier
The Birth of Stochastics on the Stock Market
In the history of science, there are those peculiar biographies in which an idea is far ahead of its time and, for that very reason, initially has almost no impact. In the case of Louis Bachelier,…





















