Myron Scholes

Origins and early life

Myron Scholes was born in Timmins, Ontario, on 1 July 1941, the son of Jess Scholes, a dentist drawn to the gold-mining town during the Depression, and of Anne Scholes, who with her uncle built a chain of department stores there. His mother's family had come from Ukraine at the turn of the century, and he is Jewish: when he won the Nobel, a San Francisco Jewish weekly reported that he attended a Conservative synagogue in Greenwich and Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, where both his daughters were confirmed.

Work and career

The family moved to Hamilton when he was ten; his mother died of cancer when he was sixteen, and scarred corneas made reading so hard that he learned to think abstractly and to listen, until a transplant at twenty-six greatly improved his sight. After an economics degree at McMaster in 1962 he went to Chicago, where a summer job programming computers for professors drew him into research and Merton Miller urged him to take a doctorate, completed in 1969.

At MIT's Sloan School, where he began teaching in 1968, he met Fischer Black, and in 1973 the two published The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities, whose formula, the Nobel committee wrote, thousands of traders use every day. Back in Chicago from 1973 he worked on the Center for Research in Security Prices databases and studied, often with Miller, how dividends and taxes affect share prices. He joined Stanford's business and law schools in 1983, presided over the American Finance Association in 1990 and became an emeritus professor in 1996.

Recognition

He shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Robert Merton “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives”, a prize that Fischer Black, whose death in 1995 made him ineligible, could not share. He has since worked in investment management and, according to Stanford, is chief investment scientist at Janus Henderson Investors.