Robert C. Merton: The First Financial Engineer

Abstract

This is an edited version of a talk given at the Robert C. Merton 75th Birthday Celebration Conference held at MIT on August 5 and 6, 2019. A video of the talk is available at https://bit.ly/2nvITM6. This article is one of a pair of articles published in this volume about Robert C. Merton's contributions to the science of financial economics. The other article in this pair is ¤quot¤Robert C. Merton and the Science of Finance¤quot¤ by Zvi Bodie.