This book is a conversation on five dozen stories that provide an insight into the colorful world of financial mathematics and financial markets in a relaxed, understandable and entertaining form. The authors discuss topics such as returns, real interest rates, present values, arbitrage, duplication, options, swaps, the Black-Scholes equation and much more. The readers will learn how to analyze, calculate and discover the many financial mathematical decisions the daily routine constantly demands. The book is an exhaustive resource in terms of scope and thematic diversity. Numerous stories are inspired from the fields of portfolio optimization and actuarial mathematics, which also present basic results and methods of probability theory. The authors also provide basic mathematical foundations to enable even a new student to ease into the topics with all the necessary information.

Prof. Dr. Ralf Korn teaches at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). He collaborates with the Fraunhofer ITWM on research projects for the finance and insurance industry. He was previously the Chairman of the German Society for Insurance and Financial Mathematics (2015-2019) and has authored several successful books on financial mathematics. He is also the co-Editor of the European Actuarial Journal (Springer), and Editor of 'Series in Quantitative Finance' (World Scientific). Prof. Dr. Bernd Luderer taught at the Faculty of Mathematics at the Chemnitz University ofTechnology (Germany). He is the Editor of the German-language series 'Studienbücher Wirtschaftsmathematik' (Springer), and author of numerous successful textbooks on business and financial mathematics.