Ten Nobels for the future

Gérard Debreu was born in Calais in 1921. In 1941 he was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he received his degree in Mathematics in 1946 after two years in the French army. In the meantime, he had begun to apply his talent for mathematics to economics, an interest that became a vocation when he discovered the theory of general economic equilibrium as formulated by Maurice Allais in his 1943 book A la recherche d'une discipline économique.

After two and a half years at the CNRS, in 1949 he received a Rockefeller Fellowship, which gave him the opportunity to visit a wide variety of universities in the United States. During these years the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago was attempting to bring greater intellectual discipline and mathematical rigour to economic theory and invited the young French economist to remain in the United States as a Research Associate. Debreu began to apply the tools of mathematics to a number of economic questions, including the underuse of resources, preference relations of economic agents and the excess demand function.

From the mid-1950s onwards he worked on the rigorous formulation of the general equilibrium theory under conditions of certainty and uncertainty, conferring new logical validity to the models of Adam Smith and Léon Walras. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1983.

Debreu was appointed Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 and since 1975, he has been Professor of Economics and Mathematics at the university. He has taught at many US and European universities and, among the many international posts he has held, he is a member of the Council of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Française des Sciences.

1994
Innovation
and research:
an economist's viewpoint
on uncertainty