Markowitz's 1952 paper in the journal of Finance describing his portfolioselection method (though not the detail of the critical line algorithm) was later to be seen as the "harbinger" of the "new" finance, of "the mathematical and model-building revolution."" It certainly stood out: "No other article in the issue [of the journal of Finance] that carried Markowitz's paper contains a single equation." (Bernstein 1992, p. 42) Indeed, Markowitz's contribution to the Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, with its matrix algebra and its careful analysis of the mathematical properties of the critical line algorithm, inhabited an epistemic culture quite different from that traditional in the academic study of finance: essentially the culture of applied mathematics.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 217