TY - JOUR T1 - Physics and Derivatives: <em>On Three Important Problems in Mathematical Finance</em> JF - The Journal of Derivatives SP - 123 LP - 142 DO - 10.3905/jod.2020.1.098 VL - 28 IS - 1 AU - Alexander Lipton AU - Vadim Kaushansky Y1 - 2020/08/31 UR - https://pm-research.com/content/28/1/123.abstract N2 - In this article, we use recently developed extension of the classical heat potential method in order to solve three important but seemingly unrelated problems of financial engineering: (a) American put pricing, (b) default boundary determination for the structural default problem, and (c) evaluation of the hitting time probability distribution for the general time-dependent Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We show that all three problems boil down to analyzing behavior of a standard Wiener process in a semi-infinite domain with a quasi-square-root boundary.TOPICS: Derivatives, options, credit default swapsKey Findings• We introduce a powerful extension of the classical method of heat potentials designed for solving initial boundary value problems for the heat equation with moving boundaries.• We demonstrate the versatility of our method by solving several classical problems of financial engineering in a unified fashion.• In particular, we find the boundary corresponding to the constant default intensity in the structural default model, thus solving in the affirmative a long outstanding problem. ER -