1. Louis Bachelier is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his doctoral thesis The Theory of Speculation.
10 Facts About Louis Bachelier
1. 2.
Louis Bachelier is considered as the forefather of mathematical finance and a pioneer in the study of stochastic processes.
3.
Louis Bachelier's father was a wine merchant and amateur scientist, and the vice-consul of Venezuela at Le Havre.
4.
Louis Bachelier's mother was the daughter of an important banker.
5.
Louis Bachelier arrived in Paris in 1892 to study at the Sorbonne, where his grades were less than ideal.
6.
For several years following the successful defense of his thesis, Louis Bachelier further developed the theory of diffusion processes, and was published in prestigious journals.
7.
Louis Bachelier married Augustine Jeanne Maillot in September 1920 but was widowed.
8.
Louis Bachelier moved to Rennes in 1925, but was finally awarded a permanent professorship in 1927 at the University of Besancon, where he worked for 10 years until his retirement.
9.
Besides the setback that the war had caused him, Louis Bachelier was blackballed in 1926 when he attempted to receive a permanent position at Dijon.
10.
The arguments Louis Bachelier used in his thesis predate Eugene Fama's efficient-market hypothesis, which is very closely related, as the idea of a random walk is suited to predict the random future in a stock market where everyone has all the available information.