Merton Davies (1917-2001)

20 May 2001 − − 1917

20 May 2001 − − 1917 Frederick Gerard Friedlander . 25 December

Quant Corner Robert Merton Merton model for valuing corporate debt

‚robert merton, who’s best known for his academic work in developing option-pricing models, published his first scholarly paper on a topic far removed from finance: Gulliver’s Travels. While an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, he wrote a piece for a literature class that analyzed the physical impossibility of a flying island as described in Jonathan Swift’s classic work. Merton...

Definable Davies’ Theorem

We prove the following descriptive set-theoretic analogue of a Theorem of R.O. Davies: Every Σ2 function f : R× R → R can be represented as a sum of rectangular Σ2 functions if and only if all reals are constructible.

Profile: James Davies

has provoked a lot of interest and comment. For those who haven't read it, how would you summarise the argument? In a nutshell, I argue that psychiatry over the past 40 years, under the dominance of the medical or 'technological' model, has done a lot of harm in the name of helping vulnerable people. Not intentionally, I hasten to add, but as an outcome of taking the medical model too far. Your...