Harry Markowitz Cause of Death, NeT-Worth, Obituary, Revolutionary Economist
Emily Carr
Updated on January 18, 2026
Harry Markowitz, an economist who started a financial revolution, challenged conventional wisdom regarding stock purchases, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1990 for his discovery, passed away on Thursday in San Diego. He was 95.
According to Mary McDonald, a devoted assistant to Dr. Markowitz, the patient’s death at the hospital was brought on by sepsis and pneumonia.
Prior to the arrival of Dr. Markowitz, the investment community believed that the ideal stock-market strategy consisted of merely selecting the shares of a group of businesses that were considered to have the best prospects.
However, in 1952, he published his dissertation, “Portfolio Selection,” which rejected this common sense strategy in favor of what is now commonly referred to as modern portfolio theory (M.P.T.).
His work was centered on the fundamental connection between risk and return.
He demonstrated that the risk in any portfolio depends less on the volatility of its constituent stocks and other assets than it does on how those assets interact with one another.
With the aid of sophisticated mathematics to compute correlations and deviations from the mean, the advantages of diversification were for the first time codified and quantified.
There are now few professionals who are not familiar with this revolutionary idea and its corollaries, which have permeated all facets of money management.
According to Robert Arnott, CEO of Research Associates, a sizable investment manager in Newport Beach, California, “modern portfolio theory has gone from the halls of academia to investment management mainstream, or from gown to town,” in a videotaped interview with Dr. Markowitz.
When Dr. Markowitz heard one of his colleagues describe how his work had “a process” for what had previously been the “haphazard” development of institutional portfolios up until the 1950s, he stated he realized he deserved his position as the founder of contemporary portfolio theory.
He was selected “man of the century” in 1999 by the financial daily Pensions & Investments.
Dr. Markowitz’s investment-related research earned him the reputation of being a behavioral finance pioneer—the study of how people choose in everyday scenarios like buying lottery tickets or insurance.
He thought it essential to understand how a bet is framed in terms of various outcomes and the amount of the stakes because he understood that the delight of a similar gain often outweighs the anguish of loss.
Dr. Markowitz achieved fame in two further areas. He created “sparse matrix” approaches, which are currently common in production software for optimization systems, for addressing very large mathematical optimization problems.
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