This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded...

Paul Krugman tells the story of the Capitol Hill baby-sitting co-op as a means of introducing readers to the economics of recessions. This story, like many others in economics, is a wonderful teaching device in undergraduate courses. We take the story from where Krugman stops and develop it by...

The mathematisation of finance - excessive use of mathematical models in finance - has been blamed for the recent financial and economic crisis. We argue that the problem might actually be the financialisation of mathematics, as evidenced by the gradual embedding of branches of mathematics into...

Classical quantitative finance models such as the Geometric Brownian Motion or its later extensions such as local or stochastic volatility models do not make sense when seen from a physics-based perspective, as they are all equivalent to a negative mass oscillator with a noise. This paper...

In recent academic and to some extent public debates, mainstream economics has been accused of excessive mathematization. The rejection of mathematical and other formal methods is often cited as a crucial trait of Austrian economics. Based on a systematic discussion of potential benefits and...

I will argue that when Keynes states that, in general, probabilities are not susceptible to numerical estimation, he is arguing that the probabilities, in general, can’t be represented by single number answers or point estimates. But they can be represented by intervals. Keynes’s general...