Adjunct Professor of Finance

University of California, San Diego, Rady School of Management

Dr. Markowitz has applied computer and mathematical techniques to various practical decision making areas.  In finance: in an article in 1952 and a book in 1959 he presented what is now referred to as MPT, “modern portfolio theory.”  This has become a standard topic in college courses and texts on investments, and is widely used by institutional investors and financial advisors for asset allocation, risk control and attribution analysis.  In other areas: Dr. Markowitz developed “sparse matrix” techniques for solving very large mathematical optimization problems.  These techniques are now standard in production software for optimization programs.  Dr. Markowitz also designed and supervised the development of the SIMSCRIPT programming language.  SIMSCRIPT has been widely used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation systems and communication networks. 

In 1989 Dr. Markowitz received The John von Neumann Award from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and SIMSCRIPT.  In 1990 he shared The Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on portfolio theory. Dr. Markowitz is the principal of Harry Markowitz Company (contact: ). He is also an adjunct professor at the Rady School of Management, UCSD.