stylistic:style_transfer, linguistic:paraphrasing
Application in financial mathematics

Because a number of other phenomena can be modeled with the heat equation (often called the diffusion equation in financial mathematics), the Crank–Nicolson method has been applied to those areas as well. Particularly, the Black–Scholes option pricing model's differential equation can be transformed into the heat equation, and thus numerical solutions for option pricing can be obtained with the Crank–Nicolson method.

The importance of this for finance is that option pricing problems, when extended beyond the standard assumptions (e.g. incorporating changing dividends), cannot be solved in closed form, but can be solved using this method. Note however, that for non-smooth final conditions (which happen for most financial instruments), the Crank–Nicolson method is not satisfactory as numerical oscillations are not damped. For vanilla options, this results in oscillation in the gamma value around the strike price. Therefore, special damping initialization steps are necessary (e.g., fully implicit finite difference method).