Maurice Allais won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988.  So why is he of interest here?  His Telegraph Obituary is headed:

Maurice Allais, who died on October 9 aged 99, was a Nobel Prize winner who warned against "casino" stockmarket practices that eventually precipitated the current global financial crisis; he also claimed to have disproved Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Now to readers of Science 2.0, the last sentence would immediately flag up a nutter alert.  Now Allais was certainly no fan of Einstein: he claimed that Uncle Albert

had plagiarised the work of earlier scientists such as Lorentz and Poincaré in his 1905 papers on special relativity and E=mc².

As for disproving General Relativity, he based this on experiments of his own using the paraconical pendulum in the 1950s.  (The picture shows a modern one at Göde Wissenschafts Stiftung.)

From what I read, the jury is still out on the significance of those experiments.  So at least he was no lightweight.

However, I think his economic and political views might raise a frisson among our readership.

In the 1990s he delighted eurosceptics by his opposition, almost unique among French economists, to the single European currency; europhobes were less enthused when he revealed that he was against it because the currency's introduction should have been preceded by wholesale European political union.

Still, I think much of what he wrote will stand the test of time:

In 1989 he warned that Wall Street had become a "veritable casino", with loose credit practices, insufficient margin requirements and computerised trading on a non-stop world market – all contributing to a dangerously volatile financial climate.

In a recent article he argued that a "rational protectionism between countries with very different living standards is not only justified but absolutely necessary".

I tend to agree with the latter, as long as it's not applied in a one-sided way.