I knew better.At that time.staft members of economics and mathematicsdepartments already discussed the use of the Black and Scholes option pricingformula；courses on stochastic finance were 0fiered at leading institutions suchas ETH Zfirich.Columbia and Stanford；and there Was a general agreementthat not only students and staft members of economics and mathematics de-partments、but also practitioners in financiai institutions should know moreabout this new topic. Soon I realized that there Was not very much literature which could beused for teaching stochastic caiculus at a rather elementary level.I aln fullyaware of the fact that a combination of“elementary”and“stochastic calculus”is a contradiction iU itself Stochastic calculus requires advanced mathematicaitechniques；this theory cannot be fullv understood if one does not know aboutthe basics of measure theory，functional analysis and the theory of stochasticprocesses However.I strongly believe that an interested person who knowsabout elementary probability theory and who can handle the rules of inte-gration and difierentiation is able to understand the main ideas of stochasticcalculus.This is supported by my experience which I gained in courses foreconomics statistics and mathematics students at VUW Wellington and theDepartment of Mathematics in Groningen.I got the same impression as alecturer of crash courses on stochastic calculus at the Summer SchOOl.
