Where can I learn more about the option valuation breakthrough?
Two wonderful histories of the breakthrough research have been written by Peter Bernstein: Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (1992) and Against the Gods – The Remarkable Story of Risk (1996). The Nobel Prize web site, http://www.nobel.se/, also has a good description of the work by Fischer Black, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes.