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Fischer Black: the Mathematics of Uncertainty Graciela Chichilnisky comm-chichilnisky.qxp 4/22/98 8:12 AM Page 319 Fischer Black: The Mathematics of Uncertainty Graciela Chichilnisky “The mystery of brilliant productivity will al- rems is useful and well rewarded. But finding the ways be the posing of new questions, the antic- new paths that matter is essential. Fischer Black ipation of new theorems that make accessible had the skill and the judgement to do the latter. valuable results and connections. Without the A somewhat aloof and quiet man, he was nev- creation of new viewpoints, without the state- ertheless given to strong opinions and frank ment of new aims, mathematics would soon ex- critical evaluations. His death led to an out- haust itself in the rigor of logical proofs and pouring of interest from a variety of sources, a begin to stagnate as its substance vanishes. testimony of the many different paths that he Thus, mathematics has been most advanced by traveled during his life. In the winter of 1995 sev- those who distinguished themselves by intu- eral financial journals published articles fol- ition rather than by rigorous proofs”.1 Fischer lowing his death. Popular publications in eco- Black fits this description well. He was an idea nomics, such as The Economist, wrote also about man given to lively debates and to unusual and his contributions to everyday business practice. often unpopular scientific views, whose curios- Black kept working virtually until the last day of ity led him to create new theoretical connec- his life. His book Exploring General Equilibrium, tions and to pursue their practical applications published a few months ago, grapples with is- in the business world. Born in Washington in sues that involve a mathematical formulation of 1938, he graduated from Harvard College in market behavior and is at the frontier of eco- physics in 1959 and obtained a Ph.D. in applied nomics. mathematics at Harvard in 1964. Thereafter Fis- Fischer Black married three times and was the cher Black followed his own star. In a rather un- father of five children and two stepchildren. He conventional way he mixed academia with busi- changed jobs several times. Starting as a man- ness, seeking to understand the problems which agement consultant in computer science at Bolt, interested him most, typically in financial mar- Beranek and Newman for a year, where he kets. His colleagues at Goldman Sachs, the firm worked on information for libraries and hospi- where he worked from 1984 until his untimely tals, he then moved to the consulting firm Arthur death,2 recall “his sense of what’s important”. D. Little (ADL), where he was influenced by col- This, at the end of the day, is what defines good leagues working on institutional and theoretical science. Solving yesterday’s famous open theo- problems in finance. He left to found his own 1 Hermann Weyl reproduces this quote from Felix Klein’s lectures on the history of mathematics in his Unter- Graciela Chichilnisky is UNESCO Professor of Mathe- richtsblatter fur Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften matics and Economics and director, Program on In- 38 (1932), 177–188 . formation and Resources, Columbia University, 405 2Fischer Black died of cancer August 30, 1995, at his Low Library, 116th and Broadway, New York, NY 10027. home in New Canaan, Connecticut, at the age of 57. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. MARCH 1996 NOTICES OF THE AMS 319 comm-chichilnisky.qxp 4/22/98 8:12 AM Page 320 consulting accepted for publication. The paper was rejected firm, Associ- by several leading journals, appearing finally in ates in Finance, 1973 in the Journal of Political Economy. A re- in 1969. In cent piece by Merton and Scholes in The Jour- 1971–72 he be- nal of Finance reports that the difficulties of came a Ford publication were such that the empirical tests of Visiting Pro- their model appeared in print a full year earlier fessor at the in the unrefereed annual sessions volume of University of The Journal of Finance. Chicago, join- Black’s 1973 paper provides a pricing for- ing the faculty mula for options which is based on a classic as a professor economic principle, no-arbitrage. This principle in the Gradu- establishes that as long as advantageous trad- ate School of ing opportunities exist, the trading activity will Business there- not be extinguished. An arbitrage opportunity ex- after. In 1975 ists, for example, if a security can be bought in he joined the New York at one price and sold at a slightly faculty of the higher price in London. This price difference Sloan School of creates a riskless opportunity for profits, and Management trading will not cease until the two prices in at MIT. He re- New York and in London are brought into line. mained at MIT There is also an arbitrage opportunity if two until 1984, portfolios that are equivalent to each other, in when he the sense that they help hedge risks in the same shifted jobs way, can be bought at different prices. Everyone once again, will sell the more expensive portfolio to buy the this time out of cheaper one. Trading activity should wipe out Fischer Black academia and such opportunities. At a rest point of the trad- back into the ing activity, called a market “equilibrium”, there business world, to join Goldman Sachs & Com- must be no such arbitrage opportunities. The pany, where he became a partner and worked equilibrium of the trading system leads to the until his death. Fischer Black was president of determination of prices, formally through the use the American Finance Association in 1985, was of diffusion processes and simple stochastic selected Financial Engineer of the Year in 1994, calculus. This in a nutshell is the concept behind and received the Graham and Dodd Award for the Black-Scholes formula. the best published paper in The Financial Analy- The concept of no-arbitrage pricing is not sis Journal four times.3 Fischer Black is perhaps new, but Black and Scholes gave it a new use. best known for his work with Myron Scholes in There is a long and distinguished tradition of developing a mathematical model for pricing using no-arbitrage techniques to price assets. In securities called options. He met Scholes through 1931 Harold Hotelling, a highly original mathe- Michael Jensen, with whom he worked on a con- matical economist at Columbia University, used sulting project to evaluate mutual funds. Sc- this method to explain why the prices of ex- holes introduced Black to Robert Merton, and the haustible resources, such as petroleum, must in- three worked closely on the problem of valuing crease at the same rate as the rate of interest. financial instruments. Hotelling’s finding4 was controversial but rests Fischer Black’s most quoted paper is on the on a sound and now well-accepted fact: that nat- Black-Scholes option pricing model. This paper, ural resources are assets as much as any other “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabili- financial assets. People will trade them until ties”, finds a formula for pricing an option. An their value and their returns match those of option is a security giving the right, but not the other available opportunities. obligation, to buy or sell an asset, subject to certain conditions, within a specified period of 4H. Hotelling, The economics of exhaustible resources, time. This paper is much quoted and used by the- Journal of Political Economy (1931). orists and businesspeople alike. Yet, as is the case 5K. Arrow, Optimal capital policy with irreversible in- with many other classic papers in economics, vestment, Value, Capital and Growth, Papers in Hon- Black had much difficulty in getting his paper our of Sir John Hicks ( J. Wolfe, ed.), Edinburgh University Press, 1968; K. Arrow and A. Fisher, Environmental preservation, uncertainty and irreversibility, Quarterly 3A complete list of Fischer Black’s publications is pro- Journal of Economics (1974); and C. Henry, Investment vided in an article by Robert Merton and Myron Scholes decisions under uncertainty: The irreversibility effect, in the December 1995 issue of The Journal of Finance. American Economic Review (1974). 320 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 43, NUMBER 3 comm-chichilnisky.qxp 4/22/98 8:12 AM Page 321 The connection between the pricing of options observe that in equilibrium, when trading has and natural resources was also made clear by sev- achieved a rest point, the expected return of a eral other prominent economists—Kenneth hedged position must be equal to that of a risk- Arrow, Anthony Fischer, and Claude Henry—in less asset. They show that this equilibrium con- papers published in 1968 and 1974.5 Options are dition can be used to derive a theoretical valu- valuable, they said, because they allow us to ation formula. Their formula depends on wait until more information is revealed before knowing a short-term interest rate and assumes making a decision. The option gives one the op- that the stock price follows a random walk in portunity to buy an asset later at an agreed price continuous time with a variance proportional to and thus postpones the decision to buy until one the square of the stock price. This means that has more information. In summary, the option the distribution of stock prices at the end of any allows one to postpone potentially irreversible finite period is log normal and the variance of decisions until more information becomes avail- the log return is constant. In other words, while able. Thus the pricing of an option encodes the there are assumptions and unknown parameters, value of information. these depend not on individual characteristics This issue has become germane in recent such as expectations but rather on aggregate years because of concern over possible irre- market behavior on which better observations versible long-term environmental changes such are possible.7 The timing of its discovery had a as ozone depletion and global warming.
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