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 "rediscovering" an early option pricing formula, which is similar to the Black–Scholes 1973 formula; [1] he also provided a formulation of put–call parity [2] (written up formally only in 1969 by Stoll [3] ).

Bronzin 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 Academia at the age of 65.[4]

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;[5] 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,"[6] 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."