Eric Rosenfeld, who had studied at MIT in the 1970s, looked up to Merton as an “unbelievable mathematician.” He noted that a single unpublished paper of Merton’s had triggered a host of dissertations by a cadre of inspired disciples. Of course, Merton’s entire oeuvre depended on his assumptions about random walks, with their close tie-in to the physical world. As the unassuming Rosenfeld described it, he and his fellow Merton protégés used to run to the physics library looking for formulaic solutions that they could “jam into finance.”
