Gérard Debreu

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Gérard Debreu

Gérard Debreu (born July 4, 1921 in Calais , France , † December 31, 2004 in Paris ) was a French-American economist and recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for economics from 1983.

Career

He finished college just before the start of World War II , but instead of moving to university, he enrolled in an impromptu math curriculum in Ambert . He later moved to Grenoble and was accepted at the École normal supérieure in 1941 . Shortly before graduating, he volunteered in the French army after D-Day in 1944 . He was trained in Algeria and then served with the French occupation forces in Germany until July 1945.

Finally he graduated at the end of 1945 and became increasingly interested in economics, in particular in Léon Walras ' general theory of equilibrium . He was an assistant at the Center national de la recherche scientifique and received a Rockefeller scholarship which enabled him to several American universities to attend, along with those of Uppsala and Oslo in 1949 and 1950. After the University of Chicago a Got an offer to work there as a research assistant, he took up this position in the summer of 1950. Apart from brief stays in Paris , he stayed there for five years. In 1955 he moved to Yale University , where he published his first monograph Theory of Value in 1959 . 1960 to 1961 he worked at Stanford University , from 1962 at Berkeley University , where he held a chair as professor emeritus of economics and mathematics. During the late 1960s and 1970s he attended the universities of Leiden , Cambridge , Bonn and Paris .

In 1990 Debreu was the American Economic Association's president-elect.

research

In 1954, together with Kenneth Arrow, he published the widely acclaimed article Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy in the journal Econometrica , on which the Arrow-Debreu equilibrium model is based. His later work mainly dealt with differentiable utility functions and minimally concave utility functions.

In 1983 he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics for his achievements in the field of general equilibrium theory. In 1976 he was awarded the French Order of Légion d'honneur . In 1974 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Vancouver ( Four Aspects of the Mathematical Theory of Equilibrium ). In 1970 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1977 to the National Academy of Sciences and 1984 to the American Philosophical Society .

See also

Web links

Commons : Gérard Debreu  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 27, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Debreu, Gérard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French economist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH 4th July 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Calais , France
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 2004
Place of death Paris