This book is a a discussion of the calculation of specific formulas in finance. The field of finance has seen a rapid development in recent years, with increasing mathematical sophistication. While the formalization of the field can be traced back to the work of Markowitz (1952) on investors mean-variance decisions and Modigliani and Miller (1958) on the capital structure problem, it was the solution for the price of a call option by Black and Scholes (1973); Merton (1973) which really was the starting point for the mathematicalization of finance. The fields of derivatives and fixed income have since then been the main fields where complicated formulas are used. This book is intended to be of use for people who want to both understand and use these formulas, which explains why most of the algorithms presented later are derivatives prices.
This project started when I was teaching a course in derivatives at the University of British Columbia, in the course of which I sat d …
