A lucid, stimulating introduction to a wide range of mathematical techniques, their usefulness in thinking, and their application to concrete data and specific cases.

This important book offers a selection of papers cutting across the several disciplines in the social sciences in which mathematical techniques, especially model building, are increasingly becoming tools for research and conceptualization. Most of the papers are either early, seminal contributions to this type of research to psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and linguistics or definitive statements synthesizing investigations by separate persons or groups. Each of the 18 papers is placed in its disciplinary and historical context by the editors, who also interpolate frequent commentary within papers and provide thoroughly annotated reading lists for further exploration into each subject area and a chronological bibliography covering the rapid growth of mathematical social science during the past decade.