Mathematics in Science and Society

Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

presenting a talk by

Eric Weinstein
Dept of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

on

The practical side of 'pure mathematics': How differential geometry could save the government 40 Billion dollars a year and reduce the deficit by 23% over 7 years.

or

"Waiter, there's a gauge theory in my economy!"

Tuesday, November 19, 1996, 4:00 PM, Room 314, Altgeld Hall. Refreshments at 3:15 pm in Room 321, Altgeld Hall.

The overstatement of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) may be the world's most costly accounting error:

This talk will be an application of gauge theory to this outstanding problem in mathematical economics. Economists have developed numerous formulae to define, quantify, and index growth and inflation. Unfortunately, they are known to be mutually inconsistent and the discrepancies between them have come to be known as ``The Index Number Problem". According to recent Senate hearings on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a 1% error in the CPI costs the U.S. government $280,000,000,000 over 7 years. In this paper we show that the discrepancies can be eliminated in a novel way by recasting the problem in the differential geometric framework of connection theory on fiber bundles.