Hélyette Geman


Hélyette Geman is a French academic in mathematical finance. In 2022 she became the first woman in 41 years to be named ‘Financial Engineer of the Year’ by the International Association of Financial Engineers. Her career has spanned several sub-disciplines including catastrophic insurance, probability theory, and the finance of commodities. Her academic institutions include ESSEC Business School, the University Paris Dauphine, and Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently a Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Notable Research and Activities

Helyette Geman is most known for:
  • Having been the first to formally introduce the forward measure for the valuation of interest rate derivatives.
  • Having coined the term numéraire in the context of option pricing and commodities portfolio management.
  • Having exhibited a stochastic clock driven by order flow, leading to the normality of asset returns.
  • Her role in creating, with Marc Yor, the sought-after master's program, jointly operated by the French Universities École Polytechnique, Pierre and Marie Curie University, and ESSEC Business School.
  • Pricing Catastrophe Futures and Options using Bessel Processes.
  • Her work on probability distributions, specifically the "CGMY" Lévy process named after Carr, Helyette Geman, Madan and Yor.
  • Her 2005 book on Commodities Derivatives.
  • Having Organized in June 2000 the First Bachelier World Congress with Professors Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton, and Henri McKean.
  • Her book 'Insurance, Weather and Electricity Derivatives: From Exotic Options to Exotic Underlyings', 1999, Risk Books.
  • Her work on 'Bitcoins and Commodities'
  • Being the PhD supervisor of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Selected publications

Awards