Berger's classification of irreducibly represented Lie groups that can occur as holonomy groups of semi-Riemannian manifolds is a remarkable result of modern differential geometry. What is remarkable about it is that it is so short and that only so few types of geometry can occur. In Riemannian signature this is even more remarkable, taking into account that any representation of a compact Lie group admits a positive definite invariant scalar product. Hence, for any not too small n there is an abundance of irreducible subgroups of SO(n). We show that in other signatures the situation is quite different with, for example, SO(1,n) having no proper irreducible subgroups. We will show how this and the corresponding result about irreducible subgroups of SO(2,n) follows from the Karpelevich-Mostov theorem. (This is joint work with Antonio J. Di Scala, Politecnico di Torino.)

The current financial crisis has been in part precipitated by the growth of complex credit derivatives and their mispricing. This talk will discuss some of the background to the `credit crunch', as well as the models and methods used currently. We will then develop an alternative view of large basket credit derivatives, as functions of a stochastic partial differential equation, which addresses some of the shortcomings.