François Divisia
On X
2009
Dirac biographer @grahamfarmelo opines that P.D. talked nonsense about economics in Stockholm. That's correct about paragraph 3. But not 2.
I will risk challenging Graham. Dirac's larger point is OK but wrong in the specifics (as with the positron/proton flub).
First of all, by 1925 work of Algerian economist Francois Divisia, Abelian gauge potentials had already entered economics.
Additionally, Vilfredo Pareto's move towards ordinal utility can be seen as imparting a non-abelian bundle structure to welfare.
At issue in economics is that the gauge potentials are so far more determined by Levi-Civita than Yang-Mills type constructions.
If @grahamfarmelo, in 10Y the representative consumer w/ seasonal ordinal tastes is modeled by a gauged quantum string, will Dirac be right?
2021
2023
who's your favourite economist?
François Divisia or Ken Arrow or Paul Samuelson or Satoshi or Ronald Coase etc.... would be easy to defend.
But Graciela Chichilnisky or Bert Balk would be more interesting offbeat choices I could defend. I don't think they got their due for what is coming in mathematical econ.
He was very supportive of me. If I had to make a single choice it might be him or Samuelson.
Yes, but when I said ‘brightest minds’ I meant it.