Introduction
In this book we use the language of mathematics to describe situations which occur in economics. The motivation for doing this is that mathematical arguments are logical and exact, and they enable us to work out in precise detail the consequences of economic hypotheses. For this reason, mathematical modelling has become an indispensable tool in economics, finance, business and management. It is not always simple to use mathematics, but its language and its techniques enable us to frame and solve problems that cannot be attacked effectively in other ways. Furthermore, mathematics leads not only to numerical (or quantitative) results but, as we shall see, to qualitative results as well.
A model of the market
One of the simplest and most useful models is the description of supply and demand in the market for a single good. This model is concerned with the relationships between two things: the price per unit of the good (usually denoted by p), and the quantity of it on the market (usually denoted by q). The ‘mathematical model’ of the situation is based on the simple idea of representing a pair of numbers as a point in a diagram, by means of coordinates with respect to a pair of axes. In economics it is customary to take the horizontal axis as the q-axis, and the vertical axis as the p-axis.
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