Mathematical Economics: A Reader

This paper is modeled as a hypothetical first lecture in a graduate Microeconomics or Mathematical Economics Course. We start with a detailed scrutiny of the notion of a utility function to motivate and describe the common patterns across Mathematical concepts and results that are used by economists. In the process we arrive at a classification of mathematical terms which is used to state mathematical results in economics. The usefulness of the classification scheme is illustrated with the help of a discussion of fixed-point theorems and Arrow's impossibility theorem. Several appendices provide a step-wise description of some mathematical concepts often used by economists and a few useful results in microeconomics.