The definitive story of Fischer Black, one of the greatest financial minds of all time Besides revolutionizing finance with the Black-Scholes option pricing model, Fischer Black forever changed Wall Street by developing what is now known as quantitative finance. Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance explores Black's intellectual journey from Harvard to the offices of ADL, from the University of Chicago to MIT, and then to Goldman Sachs. This poignant book tells the story of one man's intellectual adventure at the very center of modern finance, fully describing the birth of quantitative finance and financial engineering along the way. * Years of research and interviews with Black's business and academic associates, as well as family and friends, are distilled into a scholarly yet personal story of the formation and development of the extraordinary mind and unique character of this unassuming renegade * Black deciphered the universe of modern finance in ways that went underappreciated for many years and would have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, if not for his untimely death in 1995 * Author Perry Mehrling weaves Black's personal story with the birth of modern finance into a vignette-based business biography that captures the essence of this extraordinary man, explaining, for the first time, the