Salih Neftçi facts for kids

Salih Nur Neftçi (born July 14, 1947 – died April 15, 2009) was a very important expert. He worked with financial markets and financial engineering. These are fields that deal with how money moves and how new financial tools are created.

Salih Neftçi also helped many big money organizations around the world. He was a very active researcher in these areas. People knew him as a great teacher of mathematical finance. He was famous for making difficult topics easy to understand.

Early Life and Education

Salih was born in Istanbul, Turkey. His family was well-known and wealthy. They had connections to the oil business. The word neft actually means oil in Arabic.

Until he was 11, Salih lived in Kirkuk, Iraq. After that, his family moved back to Istanbul. His mother, Nermin Neftçi, was a very important person. She was the vice chairman of the Turkish parliament. She was also the first woman in Turkey to hold such a high position.

Salih studied economics at the Middle East Technical University. He later earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1977. His studies focused on how business cycles work. Throughout his life, Salih stayed connected to universities in the U.S. and to Wall Street, the center of finance.

Sadly, Salih Neftçi passed away on April 15, 2009. He had a type of brain cancer. To honor him, a special fund was created in November 2009. It's called the Salih Neftçi Memorial Scholarship Fund. This fund helps students learn about financial engineering.

Teaching and Research Work

Salih Neftçi was a very productive researcher in financial engineering. He taught about many topics. These included how to price financial assets using math and how financial derivatives work. He also taught about trading strategies in new markets and how to manage financial risks.

Early in his career, Salih focused on econometrics and macroeconomics. Econometrics uses math and statistics to study economic data. Macroeconomics looks at the economy as a whole. He wrote important papers about how things like wages and jobs change during different business cycles.

Later, in the late 1980s, he started focusing on finance. He wrote very important books about the math behind financial derivatives. He also wrote about the basic ideas of financial engineering.

His Famous Books

Salih Neftçi is probably best known for two textbooks. They are called An Introduction to the Mathematics of Pricing Financial Derivatives and Principles of Financial Engineering. These books are now used as standard textbooks in many financial engineering programs around the world.

A famous expert named Paul Wilmott once said about one of Salih's books:

Where He Taught

Salih taught at several universities. These included Boston College, George Washington University, and Fordham University. In 1982, he joined the Ph.D. Program in Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He stayed there for 26 years. During some of that time, he also taught at Baruch College. This college also has a Financial Engineering Masters Program.

In 2008, Salih Neftçi moved to a position at the New School in New York. He had a great idea to encourage the New School to start a program in global finance. He believed this program would give students the best tools and knowledge for the future of international finance.

At the time of his death, he was a Professor of Economics at the New School University. He also directed a Master of Arts Program there. He was a director at the Swiss Finance Institute and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He often gave lectures at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He also lectured at the International Capital Market Association Centre (ICMA) in England.

Salih was also a consultant for important organizations. These included the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Department of State. He even wrote newspaper columns in Turkey and China. From 2005, he was on the Advisory Board for Fitch Ratings, a company that rates financial health.

Selected Publications

• An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives, Academic Press Advanced Finance, 2000 ISBN: 0125153929
• China's Financial Markets: An Insider's Guide to How the Markets Work, Salih N. Neftci, Michelle Yuan Menager-Xu, 2006