The Frame for the Not-Yet Existent: How American, European, and Soviet Scholars Jointly Shaped Modern Mathematical Economics
讲述1935年莫斯科首届国际拓扑学会议如何汇聚美欧苏数学家，并追溯冯·诺依曼、康托罗维奇等人的学术交流，揭示这一事件对战后数理经济学兴起的贡献。
Abstract This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), an outstanding event that, for the first time, brought together the most notable American, European, and Soviet mathematicians, including those who would later play decisive roles in the mathematization of economics: John von Neumann, Leonid Kantorovich, and Albert W. Tucker. The fact that Kantorovich was in contact with von Neumann and his closest colleagues, Solomon Lefschetz and Garrett Birkhoff, is hardly appreciated in the histories of mathematics and mathematical economics. Their brief academic exchange was interrupted by the increasing international isolation of Soviet mathematics and by the wars that ensued. The article provides a historical account of the conference and traces the intellectual and personal affinities of Soviet and non-Soviet mathematicians, as well as their conceptual innovations. It argues that the conference, as a singular event linking several research communities, mattered for the development of various formal frameworks and their dissemination, contributing to the intellectual landscape in which postwar mathematical economics could emerge. The article calls for a deeper analysis of conceptual affinities and motivations in applying mathematics to economics and for a more nuanced narrative linking these motivations to social and political contexts of economic modeling.