BACHELIER, Louis.

£750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Le Jeu, la Chance et le Hasard. First edition, first printing, of this popularization of Bachelier's work on speculation. Bachelier summarized his main idea in a single sentence - "The mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero."Louis Bachelier (1870-1946) was an eminent French mathematician and a pioneer in the study of financial mathematics. During his studies at the Sorbonne he wrote his famous thesis, Théorie de la speculation (1900), in which he defined Brownian motion, predating Einstein by five years, and discussed its application to the evaluation of stock options. It was the first paper to use advanced mathematics in the study of finance. This volume (the title translatable as "Games, Chance, and Randomness") is a far more accessible exposition of the thesis.The economic aspect of Bachelier's work went largely unrecognized in his lifetime until its rediscovery by financial economists over fifty years later, with astounding results. Within 25 years the theory of option pricing was substantially complete, and a multibillion-dollar global industry of option trading had emerged.

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