I’m not the world’s biggest rap fan, but this is brilliant.

Ian Wright is a researcher who combines non standard economic thinking with statistical mechanics and Mathematica simulations to draw out his points analytically. He’s my kind of chap. When I grow up, I’d like to be a bit like him. Check out his work to see why.

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Here’s a talk I gave today at the Wolfram Research Mathematica Symposium at TCD, based on my Mathematics of Growth Theory writing.I had a great time, and learned a lot, especially from Michael Quinlan of UCC, who has been using Mathematica for 15 years, and Christophe Deleplace, the Wolfram representative there.

Mathematica Symposium Lecture from Stephen Kinsella on Vimeo.

Here’s a paper I’m presenting at a Mathematica symposium at Trinity College, Dublin on September 15. The notes are 43 pages long, and cover aspects of modern growth theory, the mathematical tools behind some canonical models, and show how to implement these growth models in Mathematica.

The paper covers Solow, Romer, Mankiw-Romer-Weil, as well as Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth models. They also contain pedagogical notes on linear and dynamic programming, differential equations, and numerical analysis.

Right click the link below to download the paper. The Source file which produced the paper is quite large (18mb), so if you’d like a copy, please email me.

growththeorymacronotes_v3_reduced

Really, these notes represent a fairly good attempt at writing in the old Mathematica style. The new Mathematica style is built around usable pedagogical instruments called Demonstrations, which show the user the idea you’re trying to convey graphically and numerically, while the user never sees a line of Mathematica code. So far I’ve not learned how to build demonstrations, but I will over the next term for my two classes.

The next steps in enlarging the notes is to connect the growth models to real world data series like the Penn World Tables, and econometrics. From there one can use Mathematica for sensible policy exercises in growth and development economics.

I’m looking forward to the symposium, and hope to learn a lot from the other presenters.

Here are Mathematica notes, slides, and code for a course I taught at NUI, Galway in 2006. I recall it didn’t go down that well, but the notes are pretty cool implementations of standard Solow/Ramsey type models, so I think, on reflection, I’ll put them out there.

You’ll need Mathematica or the free mathematica player to view the .nb files, but look at the .pdfs if you’re interested.

You’ll need to evaluate the mathematica file to generate the figures and solutions. Right click the link below to get the files in a .zip file.