This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson’s mathematics. The paper sheds new light on Samuelson’s Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson’s foundational ideas, embodied in maxims that abound in Samuelson’s book, such as “Mathematics is a Language” or “operationally meaningful theorems,” unified the chapters of Foundations and gave a sense of unity to Samuelson’s economics. Second, Wilson influenced certain theoretical concerns of Samuelson’s economics. Particularly, Samuelson adopted Wilson’s definition of a stable equilibrium position of a system in terms of discrete inequalities. Following Wilson, Samuelson developed correspondences between the continuous and the discrete in order to translate the mathematics of the continuous of neoclassical economics into formulas of discrete magnitudes. In Foundations, the local and the discrete provided the best way of operationalizing marginal and differential calculus. The discrete resonated intuitively with data; the continuous did not.

中文翻译：

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EDWIN B. WILSON，不仅仅是对 PAUL SAMUELSON 经济分析基础的催化影响

本文是对保罗·萨缪尔森的起源的探索经济分析基础(1947) 从他对 Edwin B. Wilson 数学的承诺的角度来看。这篇论文为萨缪尔森的基础在两个层面。首先，威尔逊的基本思想体现在萨缪尔森书中大量的格言中，例如“数学是一种语言”或“操作上有意义的定理”，统一了基础并给萨缪尔森的经济学带来了统一感。其次，威尔逊影响了萨缪尔森经济学的某些理论关注点。特别是，萨缪尔森采用了威尔逊关于离散不等式的系统稳定平衡位置的定义。继威尔逊之后，萨缪尔森发展了连续和离散之间的对应关系，以便将新古典经济学的连续数学转化为离散量级的公式。在基础，局部和离散提供了最好的方法操作化边际和微积分。离散与数据直观地产生共鸣；连续没有。