This book is a collection of state-of-the-art surveys on various topics in mathematical finance, with an emphasis on recent modelling and computational approaches. The volume is related to a a ~Special Semester on Stochastics with Emphasis on Financea (TM) that took place from September to December 2008 at the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Linz, Austria.

Proof of the "Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing" in its general form by Delbaen and Schachermayer was a milestone in the history of modern mathematical finance and now forms the cornerstone of this book.

Puts into book format a series of major results due mostly to the authors of this book.

Embeds highest-level research results into a treatment amenable to graduate students, with introductory, explanatory background.

Awaited in the quantitative finance community.

Proof of the "Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing" in its general form by Delbaen and Schachermayer was a milestone in the history of modern mathematical finance and now forms the cornerstone of this book.

Puts into book format a series of major results due mostly to the authors of this book.

Embeds highest-level research results into a treatment amenable to graduate students, with introductory, explanatory background.

Awaited in the quantitative finance community.

This volume includes the five lecture courses given at the CIME-EMS School on "Stochastic Methods in Finance" held in Bressanone/Brixen, Italy 2003. It deals with innovative methods, mainly from stochastic analysis, that play a fundamental role in the mathematical modelling of finance and insurance: the theory of stochastic processes, optimal and stochastic control, stochastic differential equations, convex analysis and duality theory. Five topics are treated in detail: Utility maximization in incomplete markets; the theory of nonlinear expectations and its relationship with the theory of risk measures in a dynamic setting; credit risk modelling; the interplay between finance and insurance; incomplete information in the context of economic equilibrium and insider trading.

In World Mathematical Year 2000 the traditional St. Flour Summer School was hosted jointly with the European Mathematical Society. Sergio Albeverio reviews the theory of Dirichlet forms, and gives applications including partial differential equations, stochastic dynamics of quantum systems, quantum fields and the geometry of loop spaces. The second text, by Walter Schachermayer, is an introduction to the basic concepts of mathematical finance, including the Bachelier and Black-Scholes models. The fundamental theorem of asset pricing is discussed in detail. Finally Michel Talagrand, gives an overview of the mean field models for spin glasses. This text is a major contribution towards the proof of certain results from physics, and includes a discussion of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and the p-spin interaction models.

These Lecture Notes are based on a course given in June 2001 at the Cattedra Galileiana of Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The course consisted of a short introduction into the basic concepts of Mathematical Finance, focusing on the notion of “no arbitrage�, and subsequently applying these concepts to portfolio optimization. To avoid technical difficulties I mainly dealt with the situation where the underlying probability space is finite and only sketched the difficulties arising in the general case. We then pass to the scheme of utility optimisation for general semi-martingale models. Some topics of this course are not standard: for example, in the treatment of the general existence theorem for the optimal portfolio, we give a direct proof which is not relying on duality theory. Similarly, the treatment of the asymptotic elasticity of utility functions and a related counter-example are original to these notes.