Gerard Debreu
Facts
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.
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