LTCM's other famous partners, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, two economists whose work in the field of derivatives earned them a Nobel prize in 1997.

ECONOMIST: Business books (4)

Remember when the options-pricing pioneer Robert Merton won the award in 1997 a year before his hedge fund Long Term Capital Management imploded and almost took down the world financial system?

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That's not the kind of profit that causes people to thrust billions of dollars at you, as very smart investors thrust at Meriwether and his partners (who included Nobel economists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes).

FORBES: Archimedes on Wall Street

In the late 1990s the hedge fund's collapse sent ripples throughout the financial world similar to those we are witnessing today, yet it was overseen by the brilliant economic team of Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, who earlier shared a Nobel prize in economics.

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One company that has considered a merger in the past year is the Trinsum Group, which is itself the product of a union in early 2007 between Marakon, a strategy consultancy, and Integrated Finance, a financial- and risk-consulting company that includes Robert Merton, a Nobel prize-winning economist, among its founders.

ECONOMIST: Management consulting

In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius.

NEWYORKER: In the Air