ABSTRACT
At the end of summer 1996 Heinz Kurz, just back from a period of time spent at the Wren Library to work on the Sraffa papers, informed me that there was a lot of material on the relationship between Sraffa and the ‘mathematical friends’ he thanks in the Preface of Production of Commodities by means of Commodities. He also proposed to write a joint paper on ‘Sraffa and the mathematicians’, on the basis of this material. Shortly afterwards I went to Cambridge and I agreed with my frequent co-author to write such a paper. The deadline came from a conference to be held at the Fondazione Einaudi at Turin from 15 to 18 October 1998. We committed ourselves to that title and started working.
