A Quote by Herbert A. Simon
By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.
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Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.
My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.
The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.
Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.
It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.
We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of science are mathematics and logic; the mathematical set puts out the logical eye, the logical set puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it sees better with one eye than with two. Note that De Morgan, himself, only had sight with only one eye.
My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.
As mathematics had been my best subject at school, my parents proposed - and I accepted - studies at the University of Lund in mathematics, statistics, and economics. The choice of the latter subject is said to be due to the fact that at the age of five years, I was very fond of calculating the cost of the various cakes my mother used to bake.
The idea here, of course, is, you know, mathematics is the language of science, it's the way that we understand the natural world. And there's definitely been a push to sort of study advanced math and kind of reawaken the love of advanced math.
The completion of my undergraduate training at the University of California (Berkeley) provided just the needed touches of rigor at advanced levels in both economics and mathematics.
Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, "purely formal".
Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.
What is mathematics? Ask this question of person chosen at random, and you are likely to receive the answer "Mathematics is the study of number." With a bit of prodding as to what kind of study they mean, you may be able to induce them to come up with the description "the science of numbers." But that is about as far as you will get. And with that you will have obtained a description of mathematics that ceased to be accurate some two and a half thousand years ago!
It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science ... simply because it deals with quantities... As the complete theory of almost every other science involves the use of calculus, so we cannot have a true theory of Economics without its aid.
It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .
The training one receives when one becomes a technician, like a data scientist - we get trained in mathematics or computer science or statistics - is entirely separated from a discussion of ethics.
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