Gérard Debreu

Gérard Debreu ( born July 4, 1921 in Calais, France, † December 31, 2004 in Paris) was a French economist and winner of the donated by the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel Prize for Economics in 1983.

Shortly before the beginning of World War II, he finished college, but instead of switching to the University, he took part in an impromptu math curriculum in Ambert. He later moved to Grenoble and in 1941 admitted to the École Normale Supérieure. Shortly before his graduation, he joined in 1944 after the D-Day volunteer in the French army. He was educated in Algeria and then served until July 1945 the French occupation forces in Germany.

After he graduated in late 1945 and became increasingly interested in economics, in particular for the general equilibrium theory Léon Walras. He became an assistant at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and received a Rockefeller Fellowship, which enabled him to visit several American universities, as well as those of Uppsala and Oslo in the years 1949 and 1950. Having from the University of Chicago an offer got to work as a research Associate, he came to this place in the summer of 1950. There he remained, except for brief stays in Paris for five years. In 1954, he published jointly with Kenneth Arrow an erupting post titled Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy. 1955 he moved to Yale University, where he in 1959 his first monograph Theory of Value published. 1960 to 1961 he worked at Stanford University, from 1962 to the Berkeley University, where he held as a professor emeritus of economics and mathematics a chair. During the late sixties and seventies, he attended the universities of Leiden, Cambridge, Bonn and Paris.

His later works dealt mainly differentiable utility functions and minimally concave utility functions.

In 1983 he received the From the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel donated Prize in Economics (often called the Nobel Prize in economics called ) for his achievements in the field of general equilibrium theory. 1976, the French Order of the Legion d' honneur, he was awarded. In 1974 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Vancouver (Four Aspects of the Mathematical Theory of Equilibrium ).