Professor Didier Sornette is a physicist and quantitative-finance researcher best known for pioneering the detection of financial bubbles with the LPPLS model and for introducing the concept of Dragon Kings. He is the founder of the original Financial Crisis Observatory and the Chief Scientist behind this platform.
Sornette is Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich and is associated with the Risks-X institute at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). He is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and of Academia Europaea, and a recognized authority on financial risks, crises, and extreme events in complex systems.
The ideas behind LPPLS did not begin in finance. In the early 1990s, while working with the European aerospace consortium EADS (now part of Airbus), Sornette helped develop an algorithm to diagnose impending failure of critical components of the Ariane rocket from acoustic-emission recordings. The same mathematics of self-organized, accelerating instability, applied to earthquakes, material rupture, and more, became the foundation of his bubble-detection work in finance.
Sornette founded the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) at ETH Zurich in 2007 to test, in real time, whether financial crises can be diagnosed before they occur. This platform continues that mission as an independent venture. See our journey.
Authoritative external profile: Didier Sornette on Wikipedia.