When I referred in my last episode to linear algebra, I did not have in mind the little corn/iron price and labor value equations that I offered by way of illustration. I had in mind rather the Perron Frobenius theorems concerning the maximal eigenvalues of square nonnegative matrices. This material may very well be taught overseas in grade school, but I do not think it is covered that early in American schools. However, when I decided that I would present my little equations to my UNC Chapel Hill philosophy department graduate course in the spring of 2020, I was apprehensive about going through the real mathematics so I went online and googled around for a while. I came upon the official website of the North Carolina State Department of Education. There I found an elaborate table specifying what the State Department Of Education requires to be taught in every grade from kindergarten to 12th grade in North Carolina public schools, in the areas of reading, spelling, writing, American history, biology, chemistry, physics, and also mathematics. With a little effort, I determined that the simple version of my mathematical analysis used only mathematics that is required to be taught in North Carolina schools in the ninth grade, and I told my graduate students that in a desperate effort to keep them in the course.
So, if you went to an American high school and made it
through your freshman year mathematics course, you should not have any trouble
with this part of my exposition. Those of you who want the full monte can
consult my essay entitled A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx’s Labor
Theory of Value, accessible by clicking on the link to box.net at the top of
this blog.
"... Perron Frobenius theorems concerning the maximal eigenvalues of square nonnegative matrices ..."
ReplyDeleteFancy words! (But not exactly advanced math...)
box.net ... box.com?
ReplyDeleteI am having some trouble with the download (which I hope to resolve on my own), but am looking at things more carefully than I might otherwise. I notice that there is a message that UMass Amherst will be retiring Box in a few months:
ReplyDeleteBox will be retired in 2021
For the latest updates, see:
https://www.umass.edu/it/box/retirement
Quite correct, Yusef R, It is undergraduate math. Indeed, nearly all of the math used by Nobel laureate economists is undergraduate math. I think of the economists terrorizing the humanists with their math as being like Saruman and Grima Wormtongue at the end of Lord of the Rings, terrorizing hobbits in the Shire with cheap tricks
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, that was my joke not a quotation by somebody else.
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