Thomas Björk

Financial Mathematics is an exciting, emerging field of application. The five sets of course notes in this book provide a bird's eye view of the current "state of the art" and directions of research. For graduate students it will therefore serve as an introduction to the field while reseachers will find it a compact source of reference. The reader is expected to have a good knowledge of the basic mathematical tools corresponding to an introductory graduate level and sufficient familiarity with probabilistic methods, in particular stochastic analysis.

This set of lecture notes is the outcome of a lecture series, given in April 2000 by the author while holding the “Cattedra Galileiana” at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. The purpose of the lectures was to give an overview of some recent work concerning structural properties of the evolution of the forward rate curve in an arbitrage free bond market.