Introduction to the Physics of the Economy and Finance

The book is the result of some years of teaching a course in Physics Modeling in Economics and Finance to M.Sc. students of Physics/Astrophysics and Eng. Physics. It is devoted to show economics and finance as a part of a physics system by its own right and, with that, to provide students with the basic tools to face a career in finance or in research developing physics models to a very unusual system that we call an economy, but made of interactions, geometry, equilibrium, and inflation. It goes from understanding the fundamental of basic mathematics to explaining complex systems where it stops working; from the physics' meaning of money to derivative valuation; and from statistical physics to the physics of inflationary systems.

Provides the bases for physics student to understand financial markets and why they exist Offers a comprehensive approach to the mathematical tools used in finance; their strengths and weaknesses Looks at markets and economy as physics systems by their own right

Autorentext

João Pires da Cruz holds a Ph.D. in Physics and a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Lisbon. He has spent his entire career working in both the private sector and academia. In 2006, he founded Closer, a consulting company focused on developing models to understand the dynamics of markets and economic activities. In 2018, he established the course on Physics Modeling in Economics and Finance at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. Currently, he serves as the vice president for Research and Innovation at Smart4Engineering (a Paris-based group), as a Partner at Closer (a Lisbon-based consulting company), and as an invited auxiliary professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Lisbon and an invited researcher at the School of Business and Economics at Nova University of Lisbon. Additionally, he is a senior researcher at the Centre for Theoretical and Computational Physics at the University of Lisbon, and a research fellow at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Introduction to Finance.- Data, Mathematics, Physics and Information.- Financial Instruments Modeling.- Measure and Geometry.- Inflationary Systems.- Riemannian Geometry.- Geometrical Neural Networks.- Complexity Models in Finance.