This failure to credit his intellectual forebears is curious: Markowitz’s methodology is a synthesis of the ideas of Pascal, de Moivre, Bayes, Laplace, Gauss, Galton, Daniel Bernoulli, Jevons, and von Neumann and Morgenstern. It draws on probability theory, on sampling, on the bell curve and dispersion around the mean, on regression to the mean, and on utility theory.
