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...

Samuelson and Solow in their 1960 paper in the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings were among the first economists to engage with Phillips' famous unemployment/wage-inflation analysis, now referred to as the Phillips curve. They addressed the question of the relevance of Phillips's...

Fifty years ago the Norwegian economist, Leif Johansen, gave us what is now recognised as the first CGE model. While Johansen was first, he is not the father of the whole field. CGE modelling in different styles sprang largely independently from several sources. This paper describes how...

The journal of the Econometric Society, Econometrica, was established in 1933 and edited by Ragnar Frisch for the first 22 years. As a new journal Econometrica had three key characteristics. First, it was devoted to a research program stated in few but significant words in the constitution of...

Ragnar Frisch's concept of econometrics was broader in scope than the more restricted connotation it has today as a sub-discipline of economics, it may be more properly rendered as a reconstruction of economics along principles inspired and drawn from natural sciences. In this reconstruction an...

Although involved in projects of influent institutions like the Cowles Commission, the NBER, and the Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC), George Katona, the "pioneer student and chief collector of consumer anticipations data" (Tobin, 1959, p. 1) is virtually absent from accounts of the topics...

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...

Little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the three fathers of marginal utility theory, and Karl Menger, whose Vienna Mathematical Colloquium was crucial to the development of mathematical economics. The present paper...

In the paper, Edwin B. Wilson's influence on the rise of mathematical economics in America between the 1920s and 1940s is explored. The focus is laid on showing how on the grounds of his foundational ideas about science Wilson worked at the organizational and educational fronts to modernize...

Combining concrete policy-oriented modeling strategies of World War II with what was received as traditional neoclassical theory, in 1956 Robert Solow constructed a simple, clean, and smooth-functioning "design" model that served many different purposes. As a working object it enabled...