Peter Kenneth Newman

Peter Kenneth Newman (5 October 1928, Mitcham, Surrey, England - 6 November 2001, Hamilton, New Zealand) was an English economist and historian of economic thought.

Life and work

Peter Newman obtained his first degree from University College London in 1949. He initially did mainly applied work (with the Oxford Institute of Statistics, the UK government, and the United Nations) on topics ranging from the post-war reconstruction of the British clothing industry, to problems of the Sri Lankan balance of trade, the economic prospects of British Guiana (in the early Sixties) and the relationship between malaria eradication and population growth in areas where that disease was endemic.

In the 1960s he turned more towards pure economic theory, especially price theory, publishing what has been considered since to be the definitive mathematical exposition of Piero Sraffa's, followed by his first book "The Theory of Exchange" on the theory of price determination.

According to Newman the great achievement of mathematical developments in general equilibrium theory was that they forced theorists to say exactly what they meant – so that, at least in this one area of economics, it was rather more common for economists to know what they were talking about than in others.

In 1959 he moved to the United States and took up a Chair in Economics at the University of Michigan. He was appointed as the Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966, where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.

In retirement he devoted his time and talents to editing and writing contributions (often brilliant miniatures) the "" as well as two specialised dictionaries, Money and Finance (1992) and Economics and the Law (1998). At the time of his death he was working on the definitive edition of Edgeworth's "Mathematical Psychics" for the Royal Economic Society. This volume appeared posthumously in 2002.

External reference

* [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/peter-newman-729548.html Obituary by Murray Milgate, The Independent (UK), 30 November 2001]