Risk Neutral Pricing and Financial Mathematics: A Primer

Preface

It’s no easy task to write a book that makes quantitative finance seem easy. Writing such a book with two bull-headed authors can be a real battle, at least at times. But, now that we’re finished, or at least ready to begin pondering the book’s eventual second edition, we both are surprised and quite pleased with the result. Our various pre-publication readers claim to like the chapters, and seem to believe that the book well suits our intended audience (we’ll get to this shortly). Competition, skepticism, and stubbornness do seem to have a place in a joint writing endeavor.

Somewhere in the middle of an early draft of Chapter 7, a passage appeared that sparked the following exchange between the coauthors of this book, altered somewhat ...