Prom 26-30 September 2004, the "International Conference on Stochastic Fi-
Finance 2004" took place at Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestao
(ISEG) da Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, in Portugal. The conference was
one of the biggest international forums for scientists and practitioners working
in financial mathematics and financial engineering.
Taking place just before the conference, on 20-24 September 2004 was the
"Autumn School on Stochastic Finance 2004" hosted by the Universidade de
Coimbra. The goal of this event was to present instances of the interaction of
finance and mathematics by means of a coherent combination of five courses
of introductory lectures, delivered by specialists, in order to stimulate and
reinforce the understanding of the subject and to provide an opportunity for
graduate students and researchers to develop some competence in financial
mathematics and thereby simplify their participation in the conference.
At both meetings the organizing and scientific committees worked in close
contact, which was crucial for inviting many leading specialists in finan-
financial mathematics and financial engineering — eleven plenary lecturers and
eleven invited speakers. Besides these presentations, the conference included
more than eighty contributed talks distributed among eight thematic ses-
sessions: Mathematical Finance-Stochastic Models, Derivative Pricing, Interest
Rate Term Structure Modelling, Portfolio Management, Integrated Risk Man-
Management, Mathematical Economics, Finance, and Quantitative and Computa-
Computational Models and Methods.
Stochastic financial mathematics is now one of the most rapidly developing
fields of mathematics and applied mathematics. It has very close ties with
economics and is oriented to the solution of problems appearing every day
in real financial markets. We recall here an extract from the "Editorial" note
presented in volume 1, issue 1 of the journal Finance and Stochastics that
Springer-Verlag began publishing in 1997: