PART I THE HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND
1 Commercial arithmetic, theology and the intellectual foundations of Jacob
Bernoulli's Art of Conjecturing 11
Edith Dudley Sylla
2 Isaac Le Maire and the early trading in Dutch East India Company shares 45
J.G. van Dillen, Geoffrey Poitras and Asha Majithia
3 Joseph de la Vega and the Confusion de confusiones 64
Jose Luis Cardoso
PART II EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONTRIBUTIONS
4 Life annuity valuation: from de Witt and Halley to de Moivre and Simpson 79
Geoffrey Poitras
5 John Law: financial innovator 100
Antoin E. Murphy
6 Duvillard's Recherches sur les rentes (1787) and the modified internal rate of
return: a comparative analysis 116
Yuri Biondi, translated by Jeff d'Avignon and Geoffrey Poitras
PART III THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY 'SCIENCE OF FINANCIAL
INVESTMENTS'
7 Rational investors, informative prices: the emergence of the 'science of financial
investments' and the random walk hypothesis 149
Alex Preda
8 Economic instruments and theory in the construction of Henri Leftvre's 'science
of the stock market' 169
Franck Jovanovic
9 A nineteenth-century random walk: Jules Regnault and the origins of scientific
financial economics 191
Franck Jovanovic
PART IV EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONTRIBUTIONS
10 Louis Bachelier 225
Robert W Dimand and Hichem Ben-El-Mechaiekh
11 Vincenz Bronzin's option pricing theory: contents, contribution and background 238
Heinz Zimmermann and Wolfgang Hafner