Frederik S. Herzberg

Stochastic analysis is not only a thriving area of pure mathematics with intriguing connections to partial differential equations and differential geometry. It also has numerous applications in the natural and social sciences (for instance in financial mathematics or theoretical quantum mechanics) and therefore appears in physics and economics curricula as well. However, existing approaches to stochastic analysis either presuppose various concepts from measure theory and functional analysis or lack full mathematical rigour. This short book proposes to solve the dilemma: By adopting E. Nelson's "radically elementary" theory of continuous-time stochastic processes, it is based on a demonstrably consistent use of infinitesimals and thus permits a radically simplified, yet perfectly rigorous approach to stochastic calculus and its fascinating applications, some of which (notably the Black-Scholes theory of option pricing and the Feynman path integral) are also discussed in the book.

This monograph treats the theory of Dirichlet forms from a comprehensive point of view, using "nonstandard analysis." Thus, it is close in spirit to the discrete classical formulation of Dirichlet space theory by Beurling and Deny (1958). The discrete infinitesimal setup makes it possible to study the diffusion and the jump part using essentially the same methods. This setting has the advantage of being independent of special topological properties of the state space and in this sense is a natural one, valid for both finite- and infinite-dimensional spaces. The present monograph provides a thorough treatment of the symmetric as well as the non-symmetric case, surveys the theory of hyperfinite Lévy processes, and summarizes in an epilogue the model-theoretic genericity of hyperfinite stochastic processes theory.