Draft:William Martin Boyce

William Martin Boyce
Born (1938-04-21) April 21, 1938 (age 86)
Alma materTulane University
SpouseSusie B. Boyce
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Finance
Computer Science
InstitutionsNASA Manned Spaceflight Center
Bell Laboratories
Salomon Brothers

William Martin Boyce is a mathematician, bond analyst, and computer scientist.

He has degrees from Florida State University (B.S. 1959, M.S. 1960) and Tulane University (Ph.D. 1967).[1] As a high school senior he was a National Merit Scholar.

His thesis at Tulane solved the well-known "commuting functions" problem by demonstrating the existence of a pair of commuting functions with no common fixed point.[2] Boyce utilized a FORTRAN program to search the solution space for possible counterexamples, and his thesis, written in 1967, is one of the earliest examples of a computer-assisted proof.[3]

After two years as an officer in the Army and two years at NASA on Project Apollo, Boyce joined Bell Laboratories in the Mathematics and Statistics Research Center under Henry O. Pollak. Working with Andrew J. Kalotay, he researched models for pricing callable bonds[4] and devised a program that computed when a bond issue should be called that became standard for the Bell System.[5] His work with Michael R. Gary earned him an Erdős number of 3.[6]

Upon the breakup of the Bell System, Boyce moved to Salomon Brothers under Martin L. Leibowitz, where he devised a "matrix pricing" scheme for daily bond pricing still in use today.[7] . He worked on the CMPOS bond portfolio analysis system with Shlomo "Steve" Mandel and was an original member of the Yield Book fixed income analytical system team.

He retired from Citigroup as a Vice President in 2003.

References

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  1. ^ ""William M. Boyce"". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 31 August 2024.
  2. ^ Boyce, William M. "Commuting Functions with No Common Fixed Point" (PDF). American Mathematical Society. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 31 August 2024.
  3. ^ Brown, Robert F. (January 2014). "A Good Question Won't Go Away: An Example Of Mathematical Research" (PDF). American Mathematical Monthly. Retrieved 31 August 2024. Since computers only became generally available to researchers in the 1950s, this 1967 example must have been one of the first uses of a computer to solve an abstract mathematical problem.
  4. ^ Boyce, William M. (1970). "Stopping Rules for Selling Bonds". The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science. 1 (1): 27–53. JSTOR 3003021.
  5. ^ Boyce, W. M. (1979). "Optimum Bond Calling and Refunding". Interfaces. 9 (5): 36–49. JSTOR 25059810.
  6. ^ "Collaboration Distance Boyce, William M.-Erdős, Paul". American Mathematical Society.
  7. ^ Bader, Lawrence. "The Salomon Brothers Pension Discount Curve" (PDF). Retrieved 31 August 2024. The method used to determine the OAS is described in Effective Duration of Callable Bonds: The Salomon Brothers Term Structure-Based Option Pricing Model, William Boyce