How Economics Became a Mathematical Science

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Duke University Press, May 28, 2002 - Business & Economics - 313 pages
In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics.
Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics—both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge—have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations—tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.
 

Contents

Prologue
1
Burn the Mathematics Tripos
9
The Marginalization of Griffith C Evans
41
Whose Hilbert?
72
Bourbaki and Debreu
101
Negotiating at the Boundary with Ted Gayer
155
Equilibrium Proofmaking with Ted Gayer
183
Sidney and Hal
208
From Bleeding Hearts to Desiccated Robots
246
Body Image and Person
256
Notes
273
Bibliography
291
Index
310

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About the author (2002)

E. Roy Weintraub is Professor of Economics at Duke University. He is the editor of Toward a History of Game Theory, also published by Duke University Press, and the author of numerous books, including Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge.

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