Background
Cootner was born in Logansport, Indiana.
Cootner was born in Logansport, Indiana.
He attended the University of Florida, where he earned bachelor"s and master"s degree. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953.
He worked at Brown University briefly before serving in the Army. He then joined Resources for the Future. He joined finance faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management in 1959, where he started work on the "random walk" theory of securities prices, work that led to the 1964 publication of his groundbreaking book
In 1970, he left Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1978.