ABSTRACT
Economics purports to be a science about reality, about real entities such as production processes, firms, prices, consumers and so forth, all of which are real and finite entities. Mathematical theorems have no intrinsic empirical content; yet the growing use of mathematical theorems to portray and represent economic entities and their interrelations requires a greater attention to method. John von Neumann’s growth model (1937), translated in 1945, was the first major attempt to use mathematical structures and their related theorems to develop an economic analysis. To use mathematical results in this way, it is necessary to establish a strict one-to-one correspondence between mathematical object and entities. Without such correspondence, the economic interpretation lacks credibility.
