ABSTRACT
Although I am a theoretical physicist, I have been always interested in economics and, in particular, in applications of statistical physics to economics. These ideas first occurred to me when I was an undergraduate student at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute in Russia and studied statistical physics for the first time. However, it was not until 2000 when I published my first paper on this subject (Dra˘gulescu and Yakovenko, 2000), joining the emerging movement of econophysics (Farmer, Shubik, and Smith, 2005; Hogan, 2005; Shea, 2005). At that time, I started looking for economists who might be interested in a statistical approach to economics. I attended a seminar by Eric Slud, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, who independently explored similar ideas and eventually published them in Silver, Slud, and Takamoto (2002). In this paper, I saw a reference to a paper by Foley (1994). So, I contacted Duncan in January 2001 and invited him to give a talk at the University of Maryland, which he did in March. Since then, our paths have crossed many times. I visited the New School for Social Research in New York several times, and we also met and had discussions at the Santa Fe Institute, where I was spending a part of my sabbatical in January-February 2009, hosted by Doyne Farmer. During these visits, I also met other innovative economists at the New School, professors Anwar Shaikh and Willi Semler, as well as Duncan’s Ph.D. student at that time Mishael Milakovic´, who is now a professor of economics at the University of Bamberg in Germany.
