Mathematical Economics since 1925
The twentieth century, chiefly after World War II, can be said to be the golden age of mathematical economics. Formalization allowed systematizing different concepts and ideas in a consistent, unified body of knowledge. Mathematics became a central part of economists’ training and shared knowledge, for the first time dominant over the traditional literary form. What follows is an account of the main areas of development at this stage, including optimization models of individual behaviour, general equilibrium theory, game theory, and first attempts to develop formal, but non-mathematical models of the market.
More on the topic Mathematical Economics since 1925:
- Mathematical Economics since 1925
- Claims that economics is close in spirit and principle to mathematics have been reiterated many times; a well-known one is William S. Jevons’s “our science must be mathematical, simply because it deals with quantities” (1871 [1888]: 1.5, original emphasis).
- Mathematical Economics up to 1925
- References and further reading
- The classical tradition
- The 1920s
- Irving Fisher was praised by Schumpeter in his obituary as America’s “greatest scientific economist” (Schumpeter 1948 [1951]: 223).
- Evgeny Evgenievich (Eugen) Slutsky was born on 7 April 1880, in Novoye Selo in Yaroslavskaya province into a teacher’s family.
- The ‘Great Decades’: 1890-1940
- References and further reading