Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Gerard Debreu, the winner of the 1983 Nobel in economic sciences for his research on the balance of supply and demand, died Friday in Paris.

Mr. Debreu, who was 83, died of natural causes, according to a statement released yesterday by the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for nearly 30 years. His residence was an assisted-living center in Paris, where he moved about a year ago after suffering a stroke, his son-in-law, Richard De Soto, said.

Mr. Debreu won the Nobel for his work on a mathematical approach to one of the most basic economic problems: how prices function to balance what producers supply with what buyers want.

A slender 100-page book he wrote that was published in 1959, “Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium,” is considered a classic of the field.
Contributions to Mathematical Economics in Honor of Gerard Debreu
General Equilibrium Theory (International Library of Critical Writings in Economics)
Landmark Papers in General Equilibrium Theory, Social Choice and Welfare (The Foundations of 20th Century Economics)

NY Times
H. David Dalquist, creator of the aluminum Bundt pan, died on Sunday at his home here. He was 86.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Mr. Dalquist founded Nordic Ware, which has sold more than 50 million Bundt pans.

He designed the pan in 1950 at the request of members of the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, who sought to recreate cakes baked in Europe but wanted a pan made of modern materials. Mr. Dalquist created a new shape based on a German original, adding regular folds to make it easier to cut the cake.

The women from the society called the pans “bund pans” because “bund” is German for an organization or group of people. Mr. Dalquist added a “t” and trademarked the name.

NY Times
Dr. Maclyn McCarty, the last surviving member of a Manhattan scientific team that overturned medical dogma in the 1940’s and became the first to demonstratethat genes were made of DNA, died on Sunday. He was 93 and lived in New York.

His death was announced by Rockefeller University, where he worked for more than 60 years.

Dr. McCarty was also a renowned leader in research on the biology and immunochemistry of the streptococcus bacterium and its role in producing rheumatic fever.

The work that Dr. McCarty did in the 1940’s, with Dr. Oswald T. Avery and Dr. Colin MacLeod, strongly hinted that DNA was the stuff of life and paved the way for the field of molecular biology and genetic engineering. Their evidence came from experiments on the pneumococcus, at what was then known as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
The Transforming Principle: Discovering That Genes Are Made of DNA