So we have had Freidman, and now Keynes is reborn. We’ve had Black-Scholes, and now Le Denoument.

I should mention, out historical interest, that I took a course under Fischer Black, cross enrolling at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. The course was called “Problems in Finance”. The course consisted of more than a hundred questions which were handed out before the first day. As I recall there were not more than 20 students in it. Fischer Black himself came to class in a three piece suit. He had a very precise manner and a sharp analytical mind, and I recall, though it may be a trick of memory, that he had a notebook he consulted for some reason before turning to each student and ask him to tackle the next question on the list.

The questions were of the type ‘suppose there exists this instrument with this risk profile (and you had better know your statistics) how would you price it vis a vis this other instrument’. You began to see that in theory at least, the family resemblance between certain kinds of transactions. Professor Black died before he could receive the Nobel Prize. I never met Scholes.