Gerard Debreu biography

Synopsis

Born in Paris in 1921, Gérard Debreu is a nobel-prize winning economist who researched the equilibrium between prices, production and demand in free-market economies. He became a U.S. citizen in 1975 and worked as a professor at Yale and later the University of California at Berkeley.

Profile

Economist, born in Calais, NW France. He studied at the University of Paris, went to the USA in 1950 as a researcher with the Cowles Foundation at Chicago University, and was a professor at Yale (1955–61), then professor of mathematics and economics at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1962). He became a US citizen in 1975. He worked on the equilibrium between prices, production, and consumer demand in a free-market economy - an approach first articulated (as the ‘invisible hand’ that leads self-seeking men unwittingly to aid society) by Adam Smith in 1776. For this work Debreu received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1983.