Stochastic Calculus of Variations (or Malliavin Calculus) consists, in brief, in constructing and exploiting natural differentiable structures on abstract probability spaces; in other words, Stochastic Calculus of Variations proceeds from a merging of differential calculus and probability theory. As optimization under a random environment is at the heart of mathematical finance, and as differential calculus is of paramount importance for the search of extrema, it is not surprising that Stochastic Calculus of Variations appears in mathematical finance. The computation of price sensitivities (or Greeks) obviously belongs to the realm of differential calculus.
