Tapan Mitra, 1948-2019

Goldwyn Smith Professor of Economics, Cornell University

Lecture Notes on Mathematics for Economists, and Supplementary Material (read below):

Notes by Tapan Mitra: I have added some material, including worked out problems, which were reproduced from solutions prepared by Christopher Handy (who was my TA for the Econ 617 course for a semester). Ram Sewak Dubey helped me to reorganize the notes (after a semester as TA for the Econ 617 course), so that the same format was used in all the chapters. This version was circulated in 2011, and has been used in more recent years.

There is also an introductory Review of Calculus and Optimization Theory that I had prepared. This was intended to indicate the background expected from students for the Econ 6170 course. However, I have found that some students have difficulty with this material even after going through the Econ 6170 course.

In Fall 2013, I taught the course again and circulated a Note on Separation Theorems for Convex Sets, a topic which I typically spent little time on in earlier years (except for a statement of the main theorem). In Fall 2014, I also circulated Notes on Positive Definite Quadratic Forms (characterization in terms of leading principal minors), the Lagrange Multiplier Theorem (general version with many equality constraints), and the Kuhn-Tucker Sufficiency Theorem.