The groundbreaking work of Black and Scholes (1973) on option pricing and its reformulation using stochastic integration by Harrison, Kreps and Pliska (1979, 1981) have turned mathematical finance into a playground of applied mathematics, in particular of stochastic analysis, statistics, optimization and numerical analysis.

The recent financial and sovereign debt crisis, that have significantly and adversely affected the European Union and particularly Greece, have also had significant effects into the theory and practice of mathematical finance.