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Léon Walras

File:Portrait_of_Léon_Walras_1862_extract.png · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Léon Walras

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Also known as Leon Walras

French mathematical economist (*1834 – †1910)

Person · Open Library

Born
1834
Died
1910
Works
66

Top works

  • Theorie des Geldes
  • Léon Walras à Lausanne
  • 理論經濟學要義
  • Cours
  • Les associations populaires coopératives

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Origin
Poltava
electronicretrowavesynthwave

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Quotes

  • It took from a hundred to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years for the astronomy of Kepler to become the astronomy of Newton and Laplace, and for the mechanics of Galileo to become the mechanics of d'Alembert and Lagrange. On the other hand, less than a century has elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith’s work and the contributions of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and myself.

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Key facts

Born
( 1834-12-16 ) 16 December 1834, Évreux , Upper Normandy , France
Died
5 January 1910 (1910-01-05) (aged 75), Clarens, now part of Montreux , Switzerland
Alma mater
École des Mines de Paris
Influences
Augustin Cournot Étienne Vacherot rationalism Adam Smith Jean-Baptiste Say
Discipline
Economics , Microeconomics
School or tradition
Lausanne School , Marginalism
Notable ideas
Marginal utility , General equilibrium , Walras's law , Walrasian auction

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

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Léon Walras.jpg
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Commons category
Léon Walras
date of birth
1834-12-16
date of death
1910-01-05
birth name
Léon Walras
name in native language
Léon Walras
Sources (3)

via Wikidata · CC0

~19 min read

Article

Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras ( French: [valʁas]; 16 December 1834 – 5 January 1910) was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value (independently of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger) and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium.

For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium. It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists". The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel. John Hicks and Paul Samuelson used the Walrasian contribution in the elaboration of the neoclassical synthesis. For their part, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, from the perspective of a logician and a mathematician, determined the conditions necessary for equilibrium.

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