A Portfolio of Nobel Laureates: Markowitz, Miller and Sharpe

Three pioneers of quantitative finance have now been justly honored: Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, and William Sharpe received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1990. From today's perspective it is hard to understand what finance was like before portfolio theory. Here I attempt to provide a very brief history of the quantitative revolution in finance, drawing upon P. Bernstein's Capital Ideas (1992) and accounts of the three Nobel laureates.