The third edition of this popular introduction to the classical underpinnings of the mathematics behind finance continues to combine sound mathematical principles with economic applications. Concentrating on the probabilistic theory of continuous arbitrage pricing of financial derivatives, including stochastic optimal control theory and Merton's fund separation theory, the book is designed for graduate students and combines necessary mathematical background with a solid economic focus.
"Over the past two decades, the mathematically complex models of finance theory have had a direct and wide-ranging influence on finance practice. Nowhere is this conjoining of intrinsic intellectual interest with extrinsic application better exemplified than in derivative-security pricing. The backgrounds of the authors of Options, Futures and Exotic Derivatives fit perfectly this pattern of combining theory and practice and so does their book.
On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures
This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness.
For readers with a basic graduate level background in algebra, these ten articles provide a readable introduction to three major interrelated subjects of noncommutative algebra. The theme is the interplay between group theory and ring theory, dealing specifically with group rings, crossed products, and the Galois theory of rings. The author has carefully included most definitions, to keep the required background minimal. Each article contains a selection of results on the given topic, a limited number of proofs or sketches, and at least a few open problems
This introductory text surveys random variables, conditional probability and expectation, characteristic functions, infinite sequences of random variables, Markov chains, and an introduction to statistics. Geared toward advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The text does not require measure theory, but underlying measure-theoretic ideas are sketched.