Abstract
The origins of much of the mathematics in modern finance can be traced to Louis Bachelier’s 1900 dissertation on the theory of speculation, framed as an option-pricing problem. This work marks the twin births of both the continuous-time mathematics of stochastic processes and the continuous-time economics of derivative-security pricing. In solving his option-pricing problem, Bachelier provides two different derivations of the classic partial differential equation for the probability density of what later was called a Wiener process or Brownian motion process. In one derivation, he writes down a version of what is now commonly called the Chapman—Kolmogorov convolution probability integral in one of the earliest examples of that integral in print. In the other, he uses a limit argument applied to a discrete-time binomial process to derive the continuous-time transition probabilities. Bachelier also develops the method of images (or reflection) to solve for a probability function of a diffusion process with an absorbing barrier. All this in his thesis five years before the publication of Einstein’s mathematical theory of Brownian motion.
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Merton, R.C. (2002). Future Possibilities in Finance Theory and Finance Practice. In: Geman, H., Madan, D., Pliska, S.R., Vorst, T. (eds) Mathematical Finance — Bachelier Congress 2000. Springer Finance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-12429-1_3
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