How Economics Became a Mathematical Science

329 pages

English

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Weintraub E. Roy Weintraub

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

329 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

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.

Sujets

Mathematics

Economics

Informations

Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	28 mai 2002
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822383802
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1448€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science

Science and Cultural Theory

A Series Edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

and E. Roy Weintraub

How Economics Became a Mathematical Science

E. Roy Weintraub

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2002

∫2002 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Stone Serif by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

For my brother, Neil (November 1, 1951–August 16, 2000)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Burn the Mathematics (Tripos)

The Marginalization of Grifﬁth C. Evans

Whose Hilbert?

Bourbaki and Debreu

Negotiating at the Boundary (with Ted Gayer)

Equilibrium Proofmaking (with Ted Gayer)

Sidney and Hal

From Bleeding Hearts to Desiccated Robots

Body, Image, and Person

Notes

Bibliography

Index

101

155

183

208

246

256

273

291

310

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences. —Karl Friedrich Gauss

It seems to me that no one science can so well serve to co-ordinate and, as it were, bind together all of the sciences as the queen of them all, mathematics.—E. W. Davis

The body of knowledge includes statements that are the answers to questions related to the subject matter of the given discipline. The images of knowledge, on the other hand, in-clude claims which express knowledge about the discipline qua discipline. . . . Thus images of knowledge cover both cognitive and norma-tive views of scientists concerning their own discipline.—Leo Corry