When economics harmonized mathematics in Japan: A history of stability analysis

This article discusses how economics was mathematized by Japanese theoretical economists with the cooperation of Japanese mathematicians before 1950. Mathematicians played the leading part in assimilating European scientific ideas and providing an internationally oriented attitude in Japan from the mid nineteenth century. They began to publish many updated textbooks in Japanese from around 1930 on. In the 1940s, Japanese mathematical economists were intensively studying the so-called stability problem, thereby mathematizing economics more rapidly than ever before. Their research activity will give us an interesting example of a process of organizing economic knowledge by introducing more mathematics into the economics literature.