Who is Robert C. Merton from When Genius Failed and what is their importance?

Robert C. Merton was a Harvard professor when he was hired by J.M. to help Long-Term raise the $2.5 billion that it required. He was the son of Robert K. Merton, a well-know social scientist at Columbia University. Merton grew up in the New York City suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson. He became interested in investments when he was an undergraduate at Cal Tech before transferring to MIT to study economics. Merton developed the field of continuous time finance, and he, along with Scholes, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1996.