Courant took credit for Courant and Robbins' What is mathematics, which my 
mother's cousin & a great guy, Herbert Robins wrote.


Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael dot perelman at gmail.com
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 1:05 PM
To: Progressive Economics
Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Sample chapter of my book


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'.



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