Throughover the workshop in Chennai floated (!) the figure of Jean/André Ville, with his inequality generalising Markov’s, who invented martingales. He is not such a well-known figure in France—at least to me!—, despite having led a rather exceptional life, from being a visiting scholar in Berlin (in the Maison académique de Berlin, along with a certain Jean-Paul Sartre) and Vienna in the 1930s, to his wife being (in Berlin) one of the many (disposable and despised) lovers of JP Sartre (to whom an open-minded or clueless Ville later sent his thèse d’université on martingales and collectives, a much more substantial piece of work than the current PhD), to him working with German and Austrian mathematicians and logicians, such as Popper, Gödel, and Wald–who, what a coïncidence!, died in India from a plane crash in 1950 that had left from Chennai–and being impressed enough by the latter to passing an economics degree in the Sorbonne when back in Paris, establishing a minimax result for a zero-sum matrix game with two players, to his counter-example to von Mises’ kollectiv, to his nickname of the King of Counterexamples in the Viennese mathematics seminar, to him operating the first (Bull) computer at the Université de Paris. (Glenn Shafer wrote a detailed accounting of his youth, on which this post is based, up to his thesis defence but a few days from France mobilising for war–where his collegue Wolfgang Doeblin would kill himself the year after, to avoid capture–. With Bernard Bru, Edmond Malinvaud and Alain Trognon among the people who helped.) After the war, he worked several years as a prépa maths teacher before working for a French State electricity companion on signal theory and Monte Carlo methods, and then returning to Université de Paris as a professor in 1957.
Archive for Edmond Malinvaud
André ou Jean Ville (1910-1989)
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags 25w5482, Abraham Wald, Alain Trognon, André Ville, Andrey Markov, École Normale Supérieure, Berlin, Bernard Bru, BIRS-CMI, Bull computers, Chennai, Edmond Malinvaud, Emile Borel, George Darmois, Glenn Shafer, history of Monte Carlo, history of statistics, India, Jean Ville, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Popper, Kurt Gödel, martingales, Maurice Fréchet, minimax strategy, Monte Carlo methods, Paris, Paul Lévy, plane crash, Richard von Mises, signal theory, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne, supermartingale, two-player game, Université de Paris, Vienna, Ville's inequality, Wolfgang Doeblin, WW II on August 12, 2025 by xi'anEdmond Malinvaud (1923-2015)
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags Collège de France, CREST, disequilibrium, econometrics, Edmond Malinvaud, ENSAE, INSEE, macroeconomics, Maurice Allais on March 11, 2015 by xi'an
The statistician, econometrician, macro- and micro-economist, Edmond Malinvaud died on Saturday, March 7. He had been director of my alma mater ENSAE (1962–1966), directeur de la Prévision at the Finance Department (1972–1974), director of INSEE (1974–1987), and Professeur at Collège de France (1988–1993). While primarily an economist, with his theories of disequilibrium and unemployment, reflected in his famous book Théorie macro-économique (1981) that he taught us at ENSAE, he was also instrumental in shaping the French econometrics school, see his equally famous Statistical Methods of Econometrics (1970), and in the reorganisation of INSEE as the post-war State census and economic planning tool. He was also an honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the 1981 president of the International Institute of Statistics. Edmond Malinvaud studied under Maurice Allais, Nobel Prize in economics in 1988, and was himself considered as a potential Nobel for several years. My personal memories of him at ENSAE and CREST are of a very clear teacher and of a kind and considerate man, with the reserve and style of a now-bygone era…
