In 2019, MIT hosted a 75th birthday symposium in honor of Robert C. Merton. The event included presentations by students and colleagues explaining the influence Merton has had on the profession and on their ideas. Each presenter focused on a specific aspect of Merton’s life and contributions so that the audience could gain a full picture of Merton’s influence while avoiding repetition across presentations. The brief contains edited transcripts of some of the speeches and panel discussions that took place at the symposium. The presentations cover Merton’s career, highlighting both his foundational work on continuous time finance and the functional approach to understanding organizations as well as recent work on retirement security and trust. Some of the presentations unveil new aspects of his life. Merton’s father, Robert K. Merton, was one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, being the originator of concepts such as role model, unanticipated consequences, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Another of the presentations makes a convincing case for Merton as the first financial engineer; the presenter argues that a body of knowledge becomes a science when a field of engineering emerges from it. If that is the case, this brief achieves two goals. It celebrates the influence of Merton on the theory and practice of finance through a series of engaging presentations, and it traces the birth of finance as a science on its own.
This book contains contributions from a workshop on topology and geometry of polymers, held at the IMA in June 1996, which brought together topologists, combinatorialists, theoretical physicists and polymer scientists, with a common interest in polymer topology. Polymers can be highly self-entangled even in dilute solution. In the melt the inter- and intra-chain entanglements can dominate the rheological properties of these phenomena. Although the possibility of knotting in ring polymers has been recognized for more than thirty years it is only recently that the powerful methods of algebraic topology have been used in treating models of polymers. This book contains a series of chapters which review the current state of the field and give an up to date account of what is known and perhaps more importantly, what is still unknown. The field abounds with open problems. The book is of interest to workers in polymer statistical mechanics but will also be useful as an introduction to topological methods for polymer scientists, and will introduce mathematicians to an area of science where topological approaches are making a substantial contribution.
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