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Mario Giampietro (Rome, Italy, 24 September 1953) is an Italian Biophysical economist and Post-normal scientist, considered as one of the world authorities on the use of energy in the economy. He is currently an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).

Biography
Mario Giampietro works on integrated assessment of sustainability. Using innovative concepts derived from Complex Systems Theory (multi-purpose grammars, impredicative loop analysis, Sudoku effects), he developed an innovative scientific approach - Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) - that can be used to integrate different narratives used in quantitative analysis. This approach makes it possible to generate quantitative representations of the viability and desirability of the metabolic pattern of modern societies using simultaneously technical, economic, demographic, social and ecological variables defined on different hierarchical levels and scales.

He studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1926. After winning a scholarship, he went on to study at the University of Paris, where his interests turned towards statistics and economics. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1930, for a thesis on latent cyclical components in time series. Another scholarship allowed him to pursue his studies for two years at the University College in London with Karl Pearson. In 1932, Georgescu-Roegen returned to Romania, and became Professor of Statistics at the University of Bucharest. He held this position until 1946. He was a professor at Vanderbilt University from 1950 to 1976.

A principal contribution to economics by Georgescu-Roegen was the concept of entropy from thermodynamics (as distinguished from the mechanistic foundation of neoclassical economics drawn from Newtonian physics) as well as foundational work which later developed into evolutionary economics. His work contributed significantly to bioeconomics and to ecological economics. .

He was a protégé of the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter. His own protégés included foundational ecological economist Herman E. Daly and Kozo Mayumi who further extended Georgescu-Roegen’s theories on entropy in the study of energy analysis.

Selected writings

 * Analytical Issues and Problems (1966). Harvard University Press.
 * “Utility”, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968). Macmillan: New York.
 * Energy and Economic Myths : Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays (1976). Pergamon Press: New York.
 * The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 * “Afterword”, in J. Rifkin and T. Howard, Entropy: A New World View (1971). The Viking Press: New York.