Théorie de la spéculation

I’m currently reading Poundstone’s book Fortune’s Formula, and am up the the part which discusses the French mathematician Bachelier, and his thesis that the prices of stocks in the market follow a random walk. His thesis was published in 1900, and slept for quite some time until resurrected after his death in 1946. A bit of googling revealed that you can get his thesis here, in French. NUMDAM is apparently a project to provide digital versions of many old mathematics papers published in French journals. Cool.

Now, I’ll have to dust off my high school French.