Welcome to My Home Page

A bit about Andy McLennan:

  • After almost two decades in the Department of Economics of the University of Minnesota, and a brief appointment at the University of Sydney, I've been a professor at the School of Economics of the University of Queensland since 2007. My research specializations are mathematical economics and game theory. Among other things, I have been interested in computational issues arising out of the problem of getting a computer to find all Nash equilibria of a finite game, which has led me to learn about literature in algebraic geometry related to the solution of systems of polynomial equations.

  • Along with the late Richard McKelvey, I was able to apply the ideas there to characterize both the largest number of totally mixed Nash equilibria a "generic" normal form game might have, and the average number. For several years I worked with Richard McKelvey, Ted Turocy, and others, on Gambit: Software Tools for Game Theory, which is a free software package for dealing with finite games in normal and extensive form.

  • Random stumbling around has led me into a variety of other projects, and you can see by checking out recent papers. One exciting development is a very simple proof of Kakutani's fixed point theorem that Rabee Tourky and I came up with. I also like pure mathematics. For those who like "Book" proofs, let me recommend the note on the Erdos-Sos conjecture. (You won't learn any economics, but you should be able to read it even if you don't know much about graph theory.) I have recently written a paper that provides a geometric analogue of the Vietoris-Begle theorem, and applies it to show that certain subsets of Riesz spaces are contractible. A couple expository papers explain (at different levels) modern versions of the Morse-Sard theorem, with a fairly easy proof. There is also a book that translates Serre's famous paper Fascieux Algebrique Coherent and provides all required background from commutative algebra.

  • For me macroeconomic research has always been a spectator sport, but that may be changing.


My CV

Last updated on October 8, 2020.