Queens
University at Kingston

Gerard Debreu

Gerard Debreu was born in Calais, France in 1921 and studied mathematics in his youth, graduating from the University of Paris in 1946. He was a member of the irreverent 'Bourbaki' group in France in the early postwar period, a set of young French mathematicians who set about reconstructing the logical foundations of mathematics, publishing all their works jointly under the name of a non-existing genius called 'Henri Bourbaki'. In 1948, he came to the USA on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and in 1950 he joined the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago [see Marschak, J.]. He began to collaborate with Kenneth Arrow and together they published an epoch-making paper, 'Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy' ( 1954), in which they provided a definitive mathematical proof of the existence of general equilibrium, using topological methods hitherto unknown in economics. .39

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© Mark Blaug, Great Economists Before Keynes: An Introduction to the Lives and Works of One Hundread Great Economists of the Past , Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986. In Stauffer Library: HB76 .B62 1986t