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Gerard Debreu (July 4, 1921–December 31,
2004) was a France|French-born United
States|American economics|economist who won the
1983 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel|Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

He was born in Calais. Just prior to the start of
World War II he finished college, but instead of
preparing for the university he studied at an
improvised math curriculum in Ambert. Later on he
moved to Grenoble. In 1941 he was admitted to the
École Normale Supérieure with Marcel Boiteux,
which he was about to graduate from in 1944 when
the D-Day made him enlist in the Allies army. He
was transferred for training to Algeria and then
served in French occupational forces in Germany
until July 1945.

Eventually he graduated in the end of 1945 and
later became interested in economics, particularly
the general equilibrium theory of Leon Walras. He
was an assistant in the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique and then obtained the
Rockefeller Fellowship which allowed him to visit
several American universities, as well as those in
Uppsala and Oslo in 1949-50. Debreu began working
as a Research Association at the University of
Chicago in the summer of 1950. There he remained
for five years, returning to Paris periodically.
In 1954 he published a breakthrough paper titled
Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive
Economy (together with Kenneth Arrow). In 1955 he
moved to Yale University. In 1959 he published his
first monograph, Theory of Value. In 1960-61 he
worked at Stanford University and since 1962 at
the University of California, Berkeley where he
held the title University Professor and Class of
1958 Professor of Economics and Mathematics
Emeritus. During his leaves in late sixties and
seventies he visited universities in Leiden,
Cambridge, Bonn, and Paris. 

In July 1975, he became a naturalized citizen of
the United States. His later studies centered
mainly on the theory of differentiable utility
functions and least concave utility functions.

In 1976 he received the French Legion of Honor. He
was awarded the 1983 Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for
his work on general equilibrium economics.

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

Debreu died in Paris at the end of 2004 of natural
causes.
==External links==
*http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1983/inde
x.html The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic
Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1983
*http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p00b/p0087.pdf
Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive
Economy
*http://elsa.berkeley.edu/facdir/debreu.html
Debreu page at Berkeley
*http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/
01/05_debreu.shtml Obituary for Debreu