Gerard Debreu

Facts

Gerard Debreu

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Gerard Debreu
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1983

Born: 4 July 1921, Calais, France

Died: 31 December 2004, Paris, France

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Prize motivation: “for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium”

Prize share: 1/1

Life

Gerard Debreu was born in Calais, France. In 1950, he joined Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago, moving with the commission to Yale in 1955. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1956. In the 1960 he became a professor at the University of California, where he taught until 1991.

Work

Gerard Debreu’s classic monograph, The Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium, was published in 1959. In it, Debreu provided the mathematical underpinnings for the phenomenon of equilibrium in supply and demand. Debreu also made significant contributions to the theory of consumer behavior.

To cite this section
MLA style: Gerard Debreu – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Thu. 28 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1983/debreu/facts/>

Back to top Back To Top Takes users back to the top of the page

Coming up

This year’s Nobel Prize announcements will take place 2–9 October. All announcements will be streamed live here on nobelprize.org.

See the full schedule
Announcement dates

Explore prizes and laureates

Look for popular awards and laureates in different fields, and discover the history of the Nobel Prize.