Gérard Debreu

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Gérard Debreu
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1983)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Gérard Debreu (French: [dəbʁø]; 4 July 1921 – 31 December 2004) was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.[1]

Biography

His father was the business partner of his maternal grandfather in

École Normale Supérieure in Paris, along with Marcel Boiteux. He was influenced by Henri Cartan and the Bourbaki writers. When he was about to take the final examinations in 1944, the Normandy landings occurred and he, instead, enlisted in the French army. He was transferred for training to Algeria and then served in the occupying French Forces in Germany
until July 1945. Debreu passed the
Oslo in 1949–50.[3] He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1956. In 1960 he became a professor at the University of California, where he taught until 1991.[3]

Debreu married Françoise Bled in 1946 and they had two daughters, Chantal and Florence, born in 1946 and 1950 respectively.

Debreu died in Paris at the age of 83 of natural causes on New Year's Eve, 2004.

Academic career

Debreu began working as a Research Associate and joined the

Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago
in the summer of 1950. He remained there for five years, returning to Paris periodically.

In 1954, he published a breakthrough paper, entitled Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy, together with

general equilibrium, using topological rather than calculus
-based methods.

In 1955, he moved to Yale University.

In 1959, he published his classical monograph, Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium (Cowles Foundation Monographs Series), which is one of the most important works in

utility function defined on a Cartesian product
of sets.

In this monograph, Debreu set up an

Arrow–Debreu security
".

In 1960–61, he worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and devoted most of his time to the complex proof that appeared in 1962 of a general theorem on the existence of an economic equilibrium.

In January 1962, he started working at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the titles of University Professor and Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and Mathematics Emeritus.

During his sabbaticals in the late 1960s and 1970s, he visited universities in

Cambridge, Bonn and Paris. In 1987, he visited the University of Canterbury as an Erskine Fellow, lecturing in economic theory.[5]

His later studies centred mainly on the theory of differentiable economies, where he showed that, in general, aggregate excess demand functions vanish at a finite number of points – basically, he showed that economies have a finite number of price equilibria.

In 1976, he received the French Legion of Honour. He was awarded the 1983 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of general equilibrium theory. He was a member of the International Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.[6][7][8]

In 1990, he served as president of the American Economic Association.[9]

Major publications

Books

  • Debreu, Gérard (1959). The theory of value: an axiomatic analysis of economic equilibrium (PDF). New York:
    OCLC 270657
    .
  • Debreu, Gérard (1986). Mathematical economics: twenty papers of Gerard Debreu. Cambridge Cambridgeshire New York: Cambridge University Press.
    ISBN 9780521335614
    .
The twenty papers: The coefficient of resource utilization · A social equilibrium existence theorem · A classical tax-subsidy problem · Existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy (by Gérard Debreu and
Kenneth J. Arrow) · Valuation equilibrium and Pareto optimum · Representation of a preference ordering by a numerical function · Market equilibrium · Economics under uncertainty · Topological methods in cardinal utility theory · New concepts and techniques for equilibrium analysis · A limit theorem on the core of an economy (by Gérard Debreu and Herbert Scarf
) · Contuinity properties of Paretian utility · Neighboring economic agents · Economies with a finite set of equilibria · Smooth preferences · Excess demand functions · The rate of convergence of the core of an economy · Four aspects of the mathematical theory of economic equilibrium · The application to economics of differential topology and global analysis: differentiable economies · Least concave utility functions

Book chapters

Journal articles

References

  1. ^ Atlas, Riva D. (6 January 2005). "Gerard Debreu, 83, Dies; Won Nobel in Economics". The New York Times.
  2. doi:10.1215/00182702-1717239
    .
  3. ^ a b "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1983". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2023-01-01.
  4. OCLC 270657
    .
  5. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "Gerard Debreu: Lecture 2 on Economic Theory (1987)". YouTube.
  6. ^ "Gerard Debreu". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  7. ^ "Gerard Debreu". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  8. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  9. JSTOR 2006785. Full text.

External links

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Awards
Preceded by
Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

1983 		Succeeded by
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