In the current sense of the term and strictly speaking, the name Ecole de Lausanne (Lausanne School), which dates back to the early twentieth century, refers to three econ­omists’ contributions to (pure) economics:

Leon Walras, who was the founder of it and held the first chair in economics at the University of Lausanne, his successor Vilfredo Pareto and, incidentally, Pasquale Boninsegni.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, economists who wanted to get together a group of authors anxious to widely use mathematics in economic reasoning dubbed themselves the Ecole mathematique (Mathematical School). A number of economists used to be called that way, namely, Antoine-Augustin Cournot, William Stanley Jevons and Irving Fisher. The name Ecole de Lausanne first occurred in French in the subtitle to the Petit traite d’economie politique mathematique (Small Treatise on Mathematical Political Economy), written by a mathematician - Hermann Laurent - in 1902, which presented a simplified version of the general economic equilibrium. The first occurrence in English might be said to date back to 1909: Edgeworth’s announcement in the Economic Journal of the ceremony in honor of Leon Walras, his “fifty-year Jubilee”. The Ecole de Lausanne is thus characterized by its innovative and systematic use of mathematical language in the study of economic phenomena and its consideration of the interdependencies between markets, through its formulation of the general economic equilibrium. It had first bite at the mathematical determina­tion of equilibrium prices, that is, prices that provide equality between supply and demand simultaneously in a competitive economy composed of a large number of markets.

The influence of the Ecole de Lausanne on twentieth-century economics is much more important than the strict development of the neo-Walrasian general equilibrium theory. It is essential in the formation of econometrics and, more broadly, has been regarded as a key paradigm since the second half of the twentieth century.