These are the expanded notes of a course intended to introduce mathematicians to some of the central ideas of traditional economics. They are just notes; they lack the “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.

There appears to be no book doing what the course attempts to do. Perhaps the nearest approach is E. Malinvaud, Lectures in microeconomic theory (North Holland and American Elsevier, 1972), which is particularly relevant to the first four chapters. There is also a useful account of the subject matter of Chapters 1–4 in D. Dewey's Microeconomics (O.U.P. paperback, 1975). The topics of Chapter 5 are those of the last chapter of David Gale's admirable Theory of linear economic models (McGraw Hill, 1960), but we take them somewhat further. Finally, the simple models of Chapter 6 are discussed at exhaustive length in P.A. Samuelson's Economics (McGraw Hill, Kogakusha, 10th ed., 1976) (especially Chapters 12, 13, 18). This is a massive text intended for the mathematically underdeveloped, but it can be read without a shudder. Indeed it seems to be the best general introduction to the background of the whole course and explains the buzzwords, without which no discussion in economics is complete. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations still makes interesting reading.

There is a fair number of books on the market with the title “Mathematical economics” or something similar. Those I have sampled have been disappointing. They devote considerable space to expounding standard mathematics.