Nobel Winner Harry Markowitz, Former Zicklin Professor, Dies
July 11, 2023Harry M. Markowitz, PhD, who was a distinguished professor in the School of Business at Baruch College when he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1990, passed away on June 22 at age 95.
Markowitz won the Nobel while he was a professor at the Zicklin School of Business.
Dr. Markowitz won the Nobel—which he shared with two other scholars—for his pioneering work in what became known as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). It was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, “Portfolio Selection,” which he published in 1952, and became his life’s work. As Investopedia wrote, “Harry Markowitz revolutionized the way that individuals and institutions invest by developing MPT, a groundbreaking investment theory that demonstrated that the performance of an individual stock is not as important as the performance of an entire portfolio.”
Markowitz was the Marvin Speiser Distinguished Professor of Finance and Economics in the Bert W. Wasserman Department of Economics and Finance when he won the Nobel Prize on October 16, 1990. He taught in the School of Business from 1984 to 1993.
Born August 24, 1927, in Chicago, Markowitz grew up in that city and received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked as a researcher for General Electric and the RAND Corporation; it was at the latter that he helped design and develop the computer simulation script SIMSCRIPT in 1962. From 1969 to 1972, Markowitz was the founder and president of the Arbitrage Management Company, a successful hedge fund that was based on MPT and is believed to have been the first fund to use computerized arbitrage trading.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Markowitz worked at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. In 1989 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize, awarded by the Operations Research Society of America.
“During the decades that I knew Harry, he was an outstanding scholar, a fine teacher, a charming person, and the sweetest and most humble person I have ever met,” said his former colleague Jack Clark Francis, PhD, a professor of economics and finance at the Zicklin School.