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Printed On Wed December 10th 2025
Wed, Dec 10, 2025
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Conversation: Serpentine Gallery ~ Edge: Map Marathon

Economic Triptych: Marginal Revolution II. These panels are actually maps of maps designed to show mathematicians and physicists that economics has the same deep structure as fundamental physics and differential geometry. The first panel shows the 'indifference map' and budget constraints of a consumer painted onto a so-called fiber bundle generalizing the x-y plane. The second shows economist François Divisia's 1925 economic theory of price and quantity indices for this consumer has the structure of an electromagnetic potential capable of reproducing the 1959 Aharonov-Bohm physical effect. The last panel shows that the theory of economic welfare has the structure of an infinite dimensional principal bundle whose symmetries are well-known to string theorists as the Virosoro group. It is depicted here in 3 visual dimensions as the mathematician's Hopf Fibration.

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher

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