The special sphere of finance within economics is the study of allocation and deployment of economic resources, both spatially and across time, in an uncertain environment. To capture the influence and interaction of time and uncertainty effectively requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools.

And at a relatively early age, ten or so, I invested my first share of stock. And I used to follow, look at companies and so forth. But throughout the whole period, and indeed right through my college years, while I was involved in the stock market, always interested in finance, I never thought of it as a full-time job.

My principal contribution to the Black-Scholes option-pricing theory was to show that the dynamic trading strategy prescribed by Black and Scholes to offset the risk exposure of an option would provide a perfect hedge in the limit of continuous trading.

Robert C. Merton Quotes