Jean Tirole: Mathematician-Economist-Humanist

De Economist

We analyze the dynamic behaviour of firms that locally interact through price competition in a social environment in an evolutionary game-theoretic model. These firms update their prices according to the behavioural rule ‘Win Cooperate, Lose Defect’ ~WCLD!, which is often observed in experimental economics. It can be regarded as a generalized Tit-for-Tat strategy. The model can explain the simu...

Jonathan Borwein: Experimental Mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein unexpectedly died on 2 August 2016, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he had been visiting on leave from home institution, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since his death, the present author and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah have been collecting Borwein’s many published papers, books, reports and talks, as well as a number of articles written by others...

Teaching with a Humanist

A Mathematician Reads

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to...

Adam Smith , Behavioral Economist