You may wish to check out Philip Mirowski's "Machine Dreams", where von Neumann's role in the post-war formulation of economic theory is treated in considerable detail. This book is extremely dense and a very difficult read and I don't feel competent to critique it in detail. But Mirowski's intellectual range is nothing short of astonishing..
-raghu Thanks, I will check it out. Anyway, these (von Neumann, Courant) guys had a tremendous impact on math education in the US. It was a mixed bag sometimes with bad results like the 1960s experiment with sets in elementary education. Or, my first introduction to sets in an inductive logic class which I barely passed. What Hilbert, von Neumann and to a lesser extent, Courant did was re-organize a compendium of 19thC advanced topics into a 20thC formulary so that their process of learning and discovery could be vastly compressed into an undergraduate foundation.They were all teachers who had to organize work for presentation which is a primary skill of being a good teacher, right? Anyway, yeah I'll get Philip Mirowski's `Machine Dreams'. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
