Léon Walras(1834 — 1910)

Léon Walras initially failed the entrance exam for the École Polytechnique twice because of his weaknesses in mathematics, even though he would later become one of the pioneers of mathematical economics. He then taught himself the mathematical tools that would make him famous.

Before becoming an economist, Walras tried several careers: he was a journalist, a railway clerk, and even a novelist, publishing a novel that went unnoticed. It was his father, an economist himself, who finally steered him toward political economy.

In 1870, Walras obtained a chair in political economy at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, because no French university wanted his ideas, which were considered too mathematical and unorthodox. There he founded what is now known as the “Lausanne School.”

Walras came up with the image of the “auctioneer” (the market that adjusts prices through successive trial and error) to explain how supply and demand eventually reach a balance. This metaphor is still taught today in economics courses.

Disappointed never to receive the Nobel Prize (which did not yet exist for economics during his lifetime), Walras considered himself misunderstood. Yet the economist Joseph Schumpeter would later call him “the greatest of all economists.”