Volume 10, No. 4 (2007)
In the nineteenth century, scholars trained in both mathematics and political economy began to construct economic theory in mathematical form. Over the course of the next half century, mathematical analysis gradually came to be applied, sometimes implicitly and often relegated to appendices and footnotes, in more and more parts of economic theory. Then, quite suddenly, in the years immediately following the Second World War, the mathematization of economic theory gathered pace. So forceful and all-encompassing was the subsequent transformation in the way in which economic theory was constructed that a mere three decades later it would be difficult to find a branch of economic theory untouched by mathematical analysis.
