Louis Bachelier, French mathematician and theorist (d. 1946)
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier (French: [baʃəlje]; 11 March 1870 – 28 April 1946) was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his PhD thesis The Theory of Speculation (Théorie de la spéculation, published 1900).
Bachelier's doctoral thesis, which introduced the first mathematical model of Brownian motion and its use for valuing stock options, was the first paper to use advanced mathematics in the study of finance. His Bachelier model has been influential in the development of other widely used models, including the Black-Scholes model. Thus, Bachelier is considered as the forefather of mathematical finance and a pioneer in the study of stochastic processes.