I am undergraduate in economics. As you may know, most prestigious departments in economics now require their aspirants to have taken Real Analysis (and Linear Algebra, too) before entering their programs.
I have time to take these courses but don't know whether any college will give admission in their math program to an econ undergrad. I don't know whether distance learning courses will help me.
Can anyone suggest me how to take math courses?
Your replies will oblige me.
I am a little confused by the question. When you ask whether college mathematics departments will accept an undergraduate economics major, what do you mean? The two options I am imagining are (a) you want to be a mathematics major later on and you're concerned the econ background will not help you, or (b) you feel you need to be admitted to graduate work in mathematics, complete that work, and then apply to economics graduate departments.
If it is option (a) then to some extent you are right. Many of the most prestigious mathematics programs will not look at the mathematical preparation of an economics major as sufficient for graduate study. It varies by school certainly, but more often than not you will need many rigorous advanced math classes and lots of extra-curriculars (e.g. doing well on the Putnam exam) to demonstrate that even though your coursework focused on economics, you have gathered the needed mathematical maturity along the way.
Some exceptions would be applied mathematics graduate programs. In that case, if you have learned programming skill or applied modeling, these can be viewed as assets that differentiate you from applicants who have done only theoretical mathematical work. It often depends on the professors who have availability to accept students and whether they see your background as a good fit for their lab's work or their on-going projects.
If it is option (b) then I see no need to formally enroll in graduate study in mathematics. Most modern universities offer linear algebra and real analysis as a basic part of the undergraduate curriculum. If your university does not, you may look into what options you have with Coursera or commuting as a special student to a nearby university (possibly as an online student) to take the classes elsewhere.
Rigorous undergraduate courses in linear algebra and real analysis will often be sufficient for entry into an economics program. The textbooks you become familiar with might also help you. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but some of the books that are often used in graduate real analysis include: Folland, Stein and Shakarchi, and Rudin.
For two very readable and gentle introductions to the subject at an undergraduate level, check out Abbott and Saxe.
If you take a course in analysis and do well -- and separately make a study of some of these books -- then you may list these textbooks when you apply to graduate school and it should often be a sufficient signal to the faculty that your mathematical maturity is high enough to do rigorous economics work.
If you are interested in a graduate-level economics book which covers the standard subjects from economics that require a lot of real analysis, then check out the first five or so chapters of Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green.
