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Source record · S-037

January 1988, and what he thought qualified him

The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.

Recorded 2026-08-15Dictated in sessionAll sources
Provenance

Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.

Primary source

As dictated

The meeting where I met Myron Scholes was in January of 1988 when I started at MAC Research — then the litigation consulting unit of the MAC Group, later renamed Cornerstone Research, which has grown from 14 people to the pre-eminent litigation consulting firm on the planet with hundreds of employees. I guess people sue each other a lot in business. That was just after I graduated in December of 1987.

I had read Cox and Rubinstein, which was the canonical textbook on options and derivatives, and therefore thought myself worthy to have a discussion with Myron Scholes — who I was vaguely aware had done seminal work in the field, but in fact had invented the entire discipline with a single equation, the first one that allowed options and derivatives to be systematically valued.

Processing

What was changed, and why

Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.

Editorial record

Two corrections applied. The dictation says January 1998; the surrounding detail — graduation in December 1987, and a first meeting with Scholes at the start of the Cornerstone period — places it in January 1988, and that is what the pages carry.

And Hare was twenty-two, not twenty-three: born 15 June 1965, graduated December 1987, started the following month. Earlier versions of several pages said twenty-three; all have been corrected.

Downstream

What was built from this

Each page below is a distillation of the account above. The chain is recorded in both directions so that a reader, a journalist or a future system can walk from a claim back to what was actually said.

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