Quality & Quantity: Introduction

This special issue of Quality and Quantity stems from the workshop “How can mathematics contribute to social science” organized by Nicola Bellomo, Pierluigi Contucci and Sandro Graffi at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bologna in March 2006. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together expertises from the two fields aiming at each other from the methodological perspective within the social science investigations. This collection, which follows the invitation of the Editor Vittorio Capecchi, has a similar intention: to allow the interested reader to have a series of papers in which problems coming from Social Sciences are studied and developed using methods and models originated in the mathematical-physics investigations. It is our belief that the two communities have a lot to learn from each other and our hope is to stimulate further studies by suggesting some bridge between them.