March 29, 1900, is considered by many to be the day mathematical finance was born. On that day a French doctoral student, Louis Bachelier, successfully defended his thesis "Theorie de la Speculation" at the Sorbonne. The jury, while noting that the topic was "far away from those usually considered by our candidates," appreciated its high degree of originality. This book provides a new translation, with commentary and background, of Bachelier's seminal work.

Bachelier's thesis is a remarkable document on two counts. In mathematical terms Bachelier's achievement was to introduce many of the concepts of what is now known as stochastic analysis. His purpose, however, was to give a theory for the valuation of financial options. He came up with a formula that is both correct on its own terms and surprisingly close to the Nobel Prize-winning solution to the option pricing problem by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton in 1973, the first decisive advance since 1900.

Aside from providing an accurate and accessible translation, this book traces the twin-track intellectual history of stochastic analysis and financial economics, starting with Bachelier in 1900 and ending in the 1980s when the theory of option pricing was substantially complete. The story is a curious one. The economic side of Bachelier's work was ignored until its rediscovery by financial economists more than fifty years later. The results were spectacular: within twenty-five years the whole theory was worked out, and a multibillion-dollar global industry of option trading had emerged."

La spectrometrie Raman, mettant en jeu des phonons de longueur d'onde nanometrique, est une technique de choix pour l'etude des nanostructures. Elle met en evidence les effets de localisation ou de melange des etats electroniques. La coherence spatiale des modes de vibration, a l'origine du phenomene d'interference Raman, permet quant a elle de sonder de la structuration spatiale de la matiere, tant d'un point de vue electronique qu'acoustique, ouvrant ainsi la voie vers des dispositifs de caracterisation integres. La specificite de l'approche developpee dans ce manuscrit reside dans la comparaison entre mesures et calculs de la section efficace de diffusion Raman. Elle apporte une comprehension quantitative des frequences mais aussi des intensites des pics mesures. Ainsi, cette demarche a permis d'identifier un nouveau mecanisme de couplage phonon-plasmon qui s'est avere etre le mecanisme dominant la diffusion Raman basses frequences dans les nano- particules metalliques.

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