Reliving the Life of Louis Bachelier

Abstract

This thesis is made up of two parts: a critical essay (I) and (II) an original epic length screenplay – 210 pages script plus fifteen pages appendix. The critical essay contains a short essay on The Yin-Yang Creative Writing Art pieces which are part of the screenplay. I term creative writing art, art pieces which use only written characters and codified symbols to visually render new artistic impressions.

The screenplay brings to a contemporary audience the life of Louis Bachelier (1870-1946), the first mathematician (French) to use modern mathematics to describe the behavior of financial markets. It lets unfold the prejudices and struggles he had to overcome, as viewed in our time by a young black mathematician of African origin named K., starting in grad school in Paris in the mid-90s, and then on to Wall Street, as a proponent of a new theory of decision making based on a proto-probabilistic concept called BICs (Basis Instruments Contracts) that he has invented. We span Bachelier’s life from the death of his parents to his famous thesis in 1900, to the dramas of the Dreyfus affair in France, WW I, up to the death of his ephemeral spouse, and the climactic denial of tenure to him in 1926. The narrative unfolds as K. himself experience similar struggles and prejudices in modern times which lead him from Wall Street to inner city life in Newark, NJ, and then to Beijing China, and back to New York. The intertwined narratives unfold in at least four languages – English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Ghomala – serving as a clinical and scientific examination of the various dimensions of prejudice, language, deriving analytical insights that bind persuasion, risk, prejudice, rewards and punishments in the decision making process. It also features two heart wrenching love stories that grip hearts and reveal characters of great humanity. This is a universal story of the travails of the misunderstood and unappreciated underdog, who nonetheless keeps on soldiering to usher in a better world.