Edwin B. Wilson and the Rise of Mathematical Economics in America, 1920–40

Abstract

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EDWIN B. WILSON, MORE THAN A CATALYTIC INFLUENCE FOR PAUL SAMUELSON’SFOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

“…Wilson was an American polymath who played a central role in the constitution of an American community of mathematical economists around 1930 and in the origins of the Econometric Society. He promoted and established a program of mathematical and statistical economics during the 1930s at the department of economics at Harvard, where Samuelson conducted his graduate studies between 1935 and 1940 (Carvajalino 2018a). Late in his life, Samuelson acknowledged that he “was perhaps [Wilson’s] only disciple” (Samuelson 1998, p. 1376).…”

“…For Wilson, the discrete was more general than the continuous; the discrete was also more cogent with data. Furthermore, since Wilson believed that calculus had emerged as an abstraction of the study of the discrete, he assumed that without loss of generality, correspondences between the discrete and the continuous could be established (Carvajalino 2018a).…”

“… 9 For Wilson, Maynard Keynes’s and Irving Fisher’s theoretical economics as well as Ragnar Frisch’s econometrics were not concerned with reality. These authors, he thought, based their work on universalizing of structural principles that existed, only, in their minds (Carvajalino 2018a). …”