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“... Investigator (1945) ‘Gains from Serendipity’; another was the Columbia sociologist of science Robert Merton, who in a 1946 article described the ‘serendipity pattern’ in sociological research. For the next decade or so, ‘serendipity’ (which by then had narrowed its meaning to a pleasing and unexpected discovery made while looking for ...”

“... Duhem, the historian can never suppress his astonishment. But the sociologist could and did. Robert Merton argued that independent simultaneous discoveries should be pereceived as the rule, not the exception. It was the singletons, not the ultiples, that required explanation. Among the more plausible arguments in defence of his inversion, ...”

“... it strange to read an entry headed ‘Anomie’ that made no mention of Emile Durkheim or of Robert Merton. ‘Anomy’ is declared obs. by the OED but the French variant anomie stands for a sort of sociological deficiency disease: it refers to the ‘lost’ and rootless state of an individual or community that lacks norms of behaviour and ...”

“... focusing on the presence among LTCM’s partners of the 1997 Nobel laureates in economics, Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes. The Horizon programme on the work of Merton and Scholes used the LTCM episode to create an exciting, but distorted and misleading, story. Even Dunbar’s ...”

“... The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like ...”

“... date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The work, published in ...”

“... Making simplifying assumptions of the kind common in economics, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton devised an elegant way of doing just that. Their mathematical model of options prices was quickly picked up by options traders, who started to use it in Chicago’s crowded trading pits. In so doing, they ...”

“... which was a central focus of an earlier tradition of the sociology of science, initiated by Robert Merton, but on which recent sociology has been too silent. Science is humanity’s finest cognitive achievement. It is also a social achievement, through and through, and can and should be analysed as such: to do so diminishes it not a whit. And ...”

“... may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an ...”

“... Cuvier – manoeuvred for mastery. In this world – to which our most trustworthy guide is not Robert Merton but Sir Lewis Namier or the Stendhal who understood Julien Sorel – Cuvier did indeed become the great place-man, dispensing a loaf here to nephew Charles and some fishes – mainly fossil ones – to brother Frédéric. And he did so because ...”

“... a hundred years after the introduction of limited liability, by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Merton, who showed that the equity of a limited liability company could be valued as if it were a financial option – that is, an instrument which offers rights over the future fruits of the company’s assets. This option has value – in the ...”

“... world draped its honours, but could assuage myself by thinking that Eliot had never witnessed the Merton Professor of English perform his capework as resourcefully and generously as he has just done. Nobody is in any doubt, of course, that he can perform swordwork of a devastating sort as well. It is not so long ago, indeed, that I experienced a sharp regret ...”

“... to bebop and avant-garde jazz; they were aspiring poets presented to Auden by Nevill Coghill, Merton Professor of English Literature. Garfitt made love to a succession of girls on the mattresses, not many of whom seem to have been undergraduates after the first, Su, who we guess is doomed as soon as we’re told she’s reading chemistry. Young beauties ...”

“... traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short: Robert Citron of Orange County, Toshihide Iguchi at Daiwa, Yasuo Hamanaka at Sumitomo and Nick Leeson at Barings, just to take examples from the early 1990s. In Leeson’s case in 1995, it was a huge unauthorised position in futures on the Nikkei 225, the main ...”

“... dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English novel’. And so with individual writers and ...”