Fuck me, I thought Earl is below Marquis. It certainly sounds so but now that I found out about it, I remember a story about PhDs here. The inventor of the quadrillion $$$+ market that's derivatives today is barely known, his name is "Louis Bachelier". Like me before taking it into the "there's no known number for it" territory, he spent an inordinate number of years on the French "Bursa" before inventing a theory which was rejected right out of the bat by his noble professors starting with Marquis-es.