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FISCHER BLACK died of cancer on August 30, 1995 at the age of 57. Risk exemplifies his ideal of mixing basic and applied research. He often said that the best pure research grows from efforts to solve applied problems - and the best applied research grows from intellectual curiosity. Fischer Black made seminal contributons to finance and economic science. Risk, the required return on assets and the markets in which they traded played major roles in his research papers. He brilliantly carried financial principles of risk and return to finance directly and to the analysis of general economic problems. Few have or had Fischer's curiosity, originality, dedication to scholarship and courage to apply principles to topics in a way that challenges the status quo. He was extremely successful in applying theory to practice, For these reasons, both the academic and practitioner communities claim him as one of their own.
Fischer started his career as a financial economist in the practitioner community when he was assigned...