Progress Towards a Game of Life Decision Support System
Harry Markowitz, adjunct professor at the Rady School of Management at UCSD, shared the 1990 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on portfolio theory. He also is the recipient of the John von Neumann Award from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques, and SIMSCRIPT.
In an article published in 1952 and a subsequent book in 1959, he presented what is now referred to as MPT, “modern portfolio theory.” This has become a standard topic in college courses and texts on investments, and is widely used by institutional investors and financial advisors for asset allocation, risk control, and attribution analysis. In other areas, Markowitz developed “sparse matrix” techniques for solving very large mathematical optimization problems. These techniques are now standard in production software for optimization programs. He also designed and supervised the development of the SIMSCRIPT programming language which has been widely used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation systems, and communication networks.
Professor Markowitz's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Soll Center for Student Opportunities.