Vinzenz Bronzin

Vinzenz Bronzin (1872–1970) was a professor of mathematics of the Accademia di Commercio e Nautica, in Trieste, Italy. He is, today, known for his "rediscovered" early option pricing formula, which is similar to the Black–Scholes 1973 formula; he also provided a formulation of put–call parity (Stoll, 1969).

He studied engineering at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute, and then mathematics and pedagogics at the University of Vienna. He was made a professor at the Accademia di Commercio e Nautica in 1900, in "Political and Commercial Arithmetic", which included actuarial science and probability theory; in 1910 he accepted the position of director. In 1937 he resigned from all of his positions at the Accademia at the age of 65.

In 1908 Bronzin published his Theorie der Prämiengeschäfte (German: "Theory of Premium Contracts") discussing a then current type of option contract. Almost every element of modern option pricing can be found in Bronzin’s book; however, like Louis Bachelier's now famous dissertation (1900), the work seems to have been forgotten shortly after it was published. Bronzin’s "methodological setup is completely different from Bachelier’s," at least in terms of the underlying stochastic framework; he takes a much more "pragmatic" approach, directly making assumptions on the share price distribution at maturity, and deriving a "rich set of closed form solutions for the value of options."

See also

• Louis Bachelier
• Jules Regnault