Gérard Debreu

Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist, born in Calais on 4 July 1921 and died in Paris on 31 December 2004. He joined the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago in 1950, moved with it to Yale in 1955, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1956. In the 1960s he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until 1991. His monograph The Theory of Value, published in 1959, supplied the mathematical underpinnings for equilibrium in supply and demand, and he received the 1983 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his rigorous reformulation of general equilibrium theory.