Barcelona, Spain

Specialised Economic Analysis

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: economy and administration
Language: English
University website: www.uab.es/
Analysis
Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.
Analysis
[A]t the close of the Middle Ages, when the so-called Arabic figures became established throughout Europe with the symbol 0 and the principle of local value, immediate progress was made in the art of reckoning. The problems... led up to the general solutions of equations of the third and fourth degree by the Italian mathematicians of the sixteenth century. Yet even these discoveries were made in somewhat the same manner as problems in mental arithmetic are now solved in common schools; for the present signs of plus, minus, and equality, the radical and exponential signs, and especially the systematic use of letters for denoting general quantities in algebra, had not yet become universal. The last step was definitively due to... Vieta... and the mighty advancement of analysis resulting therefrom can hardly be measured or imagined.
Thomas J. McCormack, "Joseph Louis Lagrange. Biographical Sketch" (1898) in his translation of Joseph Louis Lagrange, Lectures on Elementary Mathematics (1898); 2nd edition (1901) p. viii.
Analysis
Analysis and natural philosophy owe their most important discoveries to this fruitful means, which is called induction. Newton was indebted to it for his theorem of the binomial and the principle of universal gravity.
Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, [Truscott and Emory] (New York 1902), p. 176.
Analysis
My work in the future must be devoted entirely to pure mathematics in its abstract meaning. I shall apply all my strength to bring more light into the tremendous obscurity which one unquestionably finds in analysis. It lacks so completely all plan and system that it is peculiar that so many can have studied it. The worst of it is, it has never been treated stringently. There are very few theorems in advanced analysis which have been demonstrated in a logically tenable manner. Everywhere one finds this miserable way of concluding from the special to the general, and it is extremely peculiar that such a procedure has led to so few of the so-called paradoxes. It is really interesting to seek the cause.
Niels Henrik Abel, Letter to Professor Christoffer Hansteen (1826) Oeuvres Complètes de N. H. Abel, mathematician, Nouvelle edition (1881) ed., Peter Ludwig Mejdell Sylow & Sophus Lie, Vol. 2, pp. 263-265, as quoted by Øystein Ore, Niels Henrik Abel: Mathematician Extraordinary (1957) p. 113.
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