In the above Summary, I spoke about the arrival of the rocket scientists and their successors. Most of the community think that mathematicians are rather curious people, who play around far too seriously with totally incomprehensible things. This is a challenge for the applied mathematical profession.
Option trading is now an immense financial activity.
Bachelier also developed the solution to a particular diffusion equation, some five years before Einstein. Bachelier's work went unnoticed in the financial community until the 1950s. Up until this time, the most sophisticated mathematics had been elementary discounting, to calculate present values of future cash-flows. Whilst these theories form the bases for much of the serious institutional investing done around the world, their descriptive abilities have been severely questioned by practitioners in recent times. Modigliani 's and Miller 's work on corporate finance in the 1950s and 1960s have also received Nobel Prizes , in 1985 and 1990 .