School work and intellectual interests such as music and the arts were not especially important to me while I was growing up, although mathematics, my favorite subject, was fun. Baseball was my first passion: I played sand lot and Little League and rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My principal contribution to the Black-Scholes option-pricing theory was to show that the dynamic trading strategy prescribed by Black and Scholes to offset the risk exposure of an option would provide a perfect hedge in the limit of continuous trading.

My mother taught me caring and sensitivity towards the feelings of others, animals as well as humans. She gave me much good, practical advice for getting through life.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Techstars has done a great job accelerating and providing venture capital to the most promising companies to make the biggest long-term economic impact.

One-newspaper towns are not good because all the surviving newspaper does is print money. They make 25 percent on their money every year, and if they go down to 22 percent, they start laying people off.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.