Supply and demand economist Debreu dies

Gerard Debreu, a former University of California-Berkeley economist who won a Nobel Prize for breakthroughs in the study of supply and demand, has died, his family said. He was 83.

Debreu died on December 31 in Paris, said his son-in-law, Richard De Soto. Debreu had suffered a series of strokes and had been in an assisted living centre in the French capital.

Debreu won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his theoretical work on how prices operate to balance supply and demand.

“He really was the most important contributor to the development of formal math models within economics,” said Berkeley Professor Robert Anderson, in a statement from the university. “He brought to economics a mathematical rigor that had not been seen before.”