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About Harry
Harry Markowitz was an Adjunct Professor of Finance (Retired) at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management in the Business & Economics area. He taught courses on portfolio theory from 2007 until his retirement in 2019. Born August 24, 1927, in Chicago to Morris and Mildred Markowitz, he received his B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, completing the latter in 1955 with a thesis on portfolio theory. While a student, he joined the Cowles Commission. In 1952, he began working at the RAND Corporation, meeting George Dantzig and exploring optimization techniques. From 1955 to 1956, he was at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University, invited by James Tobin, during which he published the critical line algorithm in 1956 and a book on portfolio allocation in 1959.
Throughout his career, Markowitz held positions at Rutgers University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Baruch College, City University of New York, where he was Professor of Finance at the time of receiving the Nobel Prize. His research focused on portfolio theory, quadratic optimization, rational behavior under uncertainty, and software for simulation and databases. He pioneered Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), publishing the seminal "Portfolio Selection" in the Journal of Finance in 1952, introducing mean-variance efficiency and the Markowitz frontier. This work transformed financial economics by quantifying risk-return trade-offs and advocating diversification. Markowitz received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990, shared with William Sharpe and Merton Miller, and the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize. He founded and led investment firms, consulted via Harry Markowitz Company, and served on advisory boards. A generous benefactor, he and his late wife Barbara donated over $6 million to UCSD for student fellowships and donated his Nobel medal to the university library in 2018. Harry Markowitz passed away on June 22, 2023, at age 95.