Biography

 

Born in 1898, on the day Zola published “J’accuse”, Pierre Massé volunteered early, in 1916, the year when he was admitted simultaneously to the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.He took part in the Chemin des Dames offensive in 1917 and in 1919 entered the Polytechnique, subsequently moving on to Ponts et Chaussées.He was then drawn to large dam construction, particularly from the perspective of rational water storage management.During the Second World War, whilst doing his best to manage the French power grid with minimum use of coal, he developed a particular means for managing reservoirs on hydroelectric plants, which brought him recognition as one of the precursors of dynamic programming.

Having been Director of Electrical Infrastructure in 1946, Deputy Chief Executive of EDF in 1948 and Chairman of Électricité de Strasbourg from 1957 to 1959, in that year he was appointed General Commissioner of the Infrastructure and Productivity Plan.He combined volume programming with value programming, unified update rates for the calculation of public investment profitability, paid great attention to issues of urban planning and development, and finally tackled the problem of income policy.The latter project failed, because the unions mistook this for wage policy.In fact, Pierre Massé was the initiator of the Revenue and Cost Research Centre, renamed in 2000 the Council for Employment, Income and Social Cohesion (CERC).After his period as Commissioner,

Pierre Massé returned to electricity, first as chairman of EDF (1966-1968) then as Chairman of the Fondation de France from 1969 to 1973. He was elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1977.

In economics, Pierre Massé was interested in theories of economic depreciation, dynamic programming and global factor productivity, and in mathematics, in Pontryagin’s maximum principle (optimal control theory).

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