April 4, 2005
Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz Presents WSU Brinson Lecture April 15
PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University welcomes Harry Markowitz, Nobel Laureate, to campus Friday April 15, to present the annual Brinson Lecture in the College of Business and Economics.
Markowitz will discuss "Portfolio Theory: Past, Present, and Future," at 3:30 p.m. in the Smith Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE) 203. The public is invited.
"Washington State University is truly honored to have Dr. Markowitz deliver the fourth annual Brinson Lecture," said Rick Sias, professor of finance and the Gary P. Brinson Endowed Chair of Investment Management. "Dr. Markowitz's contributions changed the field of investments from a series of ad hoc rules of thumb to a science."
"I am very excited that our students will have the opportunity to meet and interact with Dr. Markowitz."
Markowitz is often referred to as the Father of the Modern Portfolio Theory. He first published his ideas on that topic in a 1952 article and later in a book in 1959. His pioneering ideas applied computer and mathematical techniques to the practice of portfolio management. This has become a standard topic in college courses and texts on investments, and is widely used by institutional investors for asset allocation, risk control, and attribution analysis.
In addition to his work on what is now commonly referred to as MPT in the finance world, he developed "sparse matrix" techniques for solving large mathematical optimizations problems. These techniques have become standard in production software for optimization programs.
Markowitz also designed and supervised the development of the SIMSCRIPT programming language. SIMSCRIPT has been widely used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation systems, and communication networks.
In 1990, Markowitz shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on portfolio theory. One year earlier, he received the John von Neumann Award from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in operations research theory.
The Brinson Lecture series is sponsored by gifts from Gary P. Brinson, a WSU MBA alumnus. He is the founder and retired chairman of Brinson Partners, Inc., and is a nationally-recognized authority on global investing. In 1999, he received the Award for Professional Excellence from the Association for Investment Management Research. After his retirement in 2000, the Brinson family created The Brinson Foundation, a philanthropic organization.
Markowitz is the fourth person to present the Brinson Lecture. The first was presented in April 2002 by Robert J. Shiller, Yale economist and author of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller, Irrational Exuberance. In 2003, the Brinson Lecture was presented by Nobel Laureate Myron S. Scholes, an academician, businessperson, and author who co-developed in 1973 the Black-Scholes Formula for the valuation of stock options, an important mechanism for managing risk in financial markets. Last year, the lecture was presented by John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, Inc. and president of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center.
