Gérard Debreu
French-born economist and mathematician, Nobel laureate in 1983.
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician who won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962.
Quick Facts
- School tradition
- Walrasian economics
- Born
- 4 July 1921
- Birthplace
- Calais, France
- Died
- 31 December 2004
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Institution
- University of California, Berkeley; University of Chicago
- Field
- Mathematical economics
- Alma mater
- École Normale Supérieure; University of Paris
Facts from the source article.
Biography
Gérard Debreu came from a family involved in Calais's traditional lace industry, where his father and maternal grandfather were business partners. He lost both parents early in life—his father by suicide, his mother from natural causes. After earning his baccalauréat before World War II, he prepared for the grande école entrance exam in Ambert and later Grenoble, both within Vichy France. In 1941, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris alongside Marcel Boiteux, coming under the influence of Henri Cartan and the Bourbaki group. Just before his final exams in 1944, the Normandy landings prompted him to join the French army instead; he trained in Algeria and served with the occupying French forces in Germany until July 1945. He passed the Agrégation de Mathématiques in late 1945 and early 1946, by which point his interest had turned to economics, especially Léon Walras's general equilibrium theory. From 1946 to 1948, he worked as an assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, shifting from mathematics to economics. A Rockefeller Fellowship took him to the United States in 1948, and he also visited universities in Uppsala and Oslo in 1949–50. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1956 and became a professor at the University of California in 1960, remaining there until 1991. He married Françoise Bled in 1946; they had two daughters, Chantal and Florence. Debreu died in Paris on New Year's Eve, 2004, at age 83 from natural causes.
Academic career
Debreu started his academic career in the summer of 1950 as a Research Associate with the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago, a position he held for five years while making regular trips back to Paris. In 1954, alongside Kenneth Arrow, he co-authored a landmark paper proving the existence of a general equilibrium in a competitive economy, using topological arguments instead of calculus. He then moved to Yale University in 1955. His 1959 monograph, Theory of Value, became a cornerstone of mathematical economics, laying out an axiomatic framework for competitive markets. In that work, he demonstrated equilibrium by showing a price system where aggregate excess demand disappears, relying on a fixed-point theorem derived from Kakutani’s work. The book also tackled cardinal utility, especially how to break down a utility function defined on a product of sets into additive parts. Chapter 7 introduced uncertainty into the model, defining a contingent commodity as a promise to deliver a good if a specific state of nature occurs—a concept later known as the Arrow–Debreu security in financial economics. From 1960 to 1961, he was at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, focusing on a complex proof published in 1962 about general equilibrium existence. In January 1962, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he eventually became a University Professor and Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and Mathematics, later emeritus. During sabbaticals in the late 1960s and 1970s, he visited Leiden, Cambridge, Bonn, and Paris. In 1987, he served as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, giving lectures on economic theory. His later research centered on differentiable economies, where he proved that aggregate excess demand functions typically vanish at only a finite number of points, implying economies have a limited set of price equilibria.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Gérard Debreu born?
Gérard Debreu was born on 4 July 1921 in Calais, France.
When did Gérard Debreu die?
Gérard Debreu died on 31 December 2004 in Paris, France.
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