Gérard Debreu was born in Calais,
France, on July 4, 1921. He is the second Berkeley faculty
member to receive the Nobel Prize in a field other than physics
and chemistry and the first ever in the field of economics.
Educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure, he received his
doctorate in economics from the University of Paris in 1946.
Debreu moved
permanently to the United States in 1950 and, soon after,
collaborated with Kenneth Arrow (who was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1972) in his initial mathematical studies of the General
Study of Equilibrium. Debreu's classic book, The Theory of
Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium, was
published in 1959, when the author was still in his 30s.
Although barely
100 pages long, The Theory of Value demonstrated that,
given a rigid set of assumptions about producers and consumers,
supply and demand do reach equilibrium in a free-market,
decentralized economy. The notion of such an equilibrium was not
new (Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, described this
phenomenon as "the invisible hand" governing economic behavior,
in 1776), but Debreu was the first to develop a mathematical
foundation for such classical thinking. He also refined the
methods of analyzing the conditions that affect equilibrium and
provided a framework for examining the ways that different
conditions affect the ability of the "invisible hand" to
allocate resources efficiently. In addition, Debreu has worked
on the mathematical basis for representing consumer behavior in
economic models, many of which are used extensively by
economists in forecasting.
Although Debreu's
heavily mathematical approach was considered avant-garde in the
1950s (he was considered an "extremist" in his approach), his
research is now in the mainstream, providing a theoretical
framework for hundreds of younger economists. His writings are
cited by scholars more often than those of any other theoretical
economist.
After a 1960-61
fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral
Sciences at Stanford and a brief stint at Yale, Debreu was named
a professor at Berkeley in 1962, and he has remained here ever
since. In 1975 he became a United States citizen; that same
year, he accepted a dual appointment with the departments of
mathematics and economics.
In 1983, this
"mathematical economist's mathematical economist," as he has
been called, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in
recognition of his three decades of important work. In
recommending Debreu for the prize, the Swedish Royal Academy of
Sciences said that his theoretical contributions lent themselves
to "far-reaching interpretations and applications." Debreu's
most striking qualities, according to his colleague Kenneth
Arrow, are "the quickness of his mind and the elegance of his
thought."
At his press
conference the day he received word of the Nobel Prize, Gérard
Debreu had this to say: "What is uppermost on my mind at the
present time is the concern that the magnificent research
environment I have known at the University during the past 20
years will be preserved. It is threatened by very lean budgets.
The research establishment cannot go on with its momentum
without some vital ingredient ---namely, funds."
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Gérard
Debreu: Economics, 1983.: The Nobel Tradition in
Berkeley: University of
California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley Development
Office: UC Press, p. 30.