Merton.

The Nobel Option

Robert C. Merton, Baker professor of business administration, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Myron S. Scholes, a professor at Stanford. Scholes and the late Fischer Black '59, Ph.D. '64, created a formula for valuing stock options. The mathematically inclined Merton, who came to Harvard Business School from MIT in 1988, applied the theory to a wide array of financial "derivatives"--the options and futures traded in volume by Harvard Management Company and other institutional investors. He told a news conference, "The things that make financial economics fun and interesting are time and uncertainty."

We're Number 1! And 43!

The U.S. News & World Report annual rankings showed Harvard and Princeton tied for first among national universities, displacing last year's top scorer Yale, which this year tied for third with Duke (there was no second-place winner). The magazine scored Dartmouth and Penn in a tie for seventh place, Brown and Columbia together in ninth, and Cornell fourteenth. Money magazine, putting its spin on the ratings game, listed "the elite values in college," purporting to compare the value of the education received to the tuition charged. Here, Harvard came in a lowly number 43, well behind Yale (21) and the leader, Cal Tech.

Hashimoto, left, spars with Heather Russell, Ph.D. candidate.

Kendo Kids

What did you do on your summer vacation? David Kuo '99, vice president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Kendo Club, reports that 10 members traveled to Japan in August, to practice their technique at Keio University's training camp, under the guidance of the coach of the Japan National Kendo team. The Harvard combatants also crossed bamboos with the Imperial Guard in Tokyo and, in a series of individual three-minute practices, with Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, a Keio graduate.

Gender Gift

Gilligan.

Carol Gilligan, Ph.D. '64, has been appointed to the University's first professorship in gender studies. The new chair, in the Graduate School of Education, is named for Patricia Albjerg Graham, BI '73, the school's dean from 1982 to 1991--the first, and so far only, woman dean of a school at the University; Graham is now Warren professor of the history of American education. The chair is also the first at the school to be funded solely by women: its $2.5 million endowment was given by Elisabeth A. Hobbs, Ed.M. '61, Emily H. Fisher, Ed.M. '61, and two anonymous donors. Gilligan is widely known for her work on the psychological and moral development of women and girls.

Nota Bene

Appointed. Rita Nakashima Brock became director of the Bunting Institute on September 1. Brock, a scholar of feminist theology and women's studies, succeeds Florence Ladd. The institute annually awards about 40 fellowships, enabling women scholars, artists, and writers to pursue a year of independent work.

Honored. For making "an outstanding contribution to the public interest," Brandeis professor of law Gary Bellow, LL.B. '60, who founded the Law School's clinical program in 1978, has earned Common Cause's Public Achievement Award.....For his work on ethnic violence in southeast Asia, Stanley J. Tambiah, Rabb professor of anthropology, has won one of three Balzan Prizes, which carry a $338,000 honorarium and are awarded by the Swiss foundation of the same name....Molecular biologist Mark S. Ptashne, Ph.D. '68, who left Harvard this summer for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York City, has won a Lasker Award for his research on the regulation of gene function.

Departing. Lamont University professor Amartya K. Sen, an economist and philosopher, will relinquish his chair at semester's end to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did his graduate work.